Irem Collection Volume 3 Review
We have once again been blessed by the shmup gods with the Irem Collection Volume 3. This collection is the one I’ve been personally looking forward to since its announcement, as it contains the fantastic Mr. Heli! So, how do these classic shooters hold up in the modern day? Let’s take a closer look.
The games included in this package are as follows: –
Mystic Riders
A beautifully animated side-scrolling shooter with a magical fantasy setting, whimsical enemies, and fast-paced spell-slinging action. As the name suggests, Mystic Riders can be played in two-player mode, and there’s an overall Cotton-esque vibe to the game with its cutesy visuals and settings. In terms of difficulty, Mystic Riders is much more laid back than other shmups and is relatively breezy to get through.
Dragon Breed
You get to ride a giant Dragon into battle! Do I need to say more!? A great arcade classic with a unique mechanic of being able to get on or off your Dragon Bahamoot to tackle some small platforming sections. Bahamoot will be tanking most of the enemies, all the while breathing fire and damaging enemies just by touching them; however, it’s still a one-hit kill if our protagonist takes as much as a single stray bullet.
It’s a great Power tip of a game, and some of the levels could be pulled right from Irem’s classic R-Type. In terms of difficulty, Dragoon Breed can be pretty tough. Although Bahamoot will absorb a lot of enemy fire, your main hitbox on the protagonist is pretty large, and you’ll be expected to position both player and dragon accordingly, which takes some getting used to.
Battle Chopper (Mr. Heli)
Mr. Heli is one of my favourite arcade games of all time. It’s a great little shooter with a big emphasis on buying power-ups, somewhat similar to how Fantasy Zone works, except there’s no shop menu with upgrades instead being scattered through each level. To survive, you are going to need to upgrade your weapons, missiles and bombs, which can all be purchased for the right amount of cash. Collecting crystals hidden in rocks will award Mr. Heli with the funds needed for these essential upgrades.
Mr. Heli's Big Adventure (PC Engine version)
This Japanese exclusive PC Engine version is the one I’ve spent the most amount of time with, so it’s great to see it included in this collection. It’s a great home port of the arcade version with tweaked difficulty and graphics, and is overall a great time!
With the exception of the PC Engine version of Mr. Heli, each game includes an option to play both the international and Japanese arcade versions of each, so you could argue that this is technically a 7-game collection, albeit with very minor differences between each region.
A nice feature in this collection is that each game includes a casual mode or a classic mode. Classic mode is as close to the arcade experience as possible with online leaderboards, whereas casual mode offers modern features, allowing you to toggle on cheats, rewind gameplay, and create save states.
In terms of performance, like many of the previous ININ/Strictly Limited compilations, Ratalaika Games has been charged with handling the porting, and they offer the same usual comprehensive feature set, such as CRT filters, Colour palette swapping, and a great implementation for pixel scaling, allowing for perfect integer scaling. The overall quality of the emulation here is outstanding, and during my time with the game, I experienced no oddities or glitching in any of the titles, and I’m happy to report the collection plays perfectly on the Switch 2.
Conclusion
Overall, Irem Collection Volume 3 is a great collection, and the inclusion of the PC Engine version of Mr. Heli is a fantastic choice! As fun as Mystic Riders and Dragon Breed are, I’d happily pay money and pick this up just for the two Mr. Heli ports alone, so it’s a great bonus that the Mystic Riders and Dragon Breed just also happen to be excellent shooters. I hope you found this review helpful, and hopefully I’ve convinced you to pick up this excellent collection.
8
Nintendo Switch review code kindly provided by ININ Games