Truxton II review

You’ve been summoned by the demanding STG with a thing for skulls

Although Toaplan’s efforts ranged from eroge mahjong (1986’s Mahjong Sisters) to platformers (1990’s Snow Bros), the studio is best known for their pioneering shoot ‘em ups. And steadily, Gothenburg-based Bitwave Games has brought these cherished shooters to Steam, with nearly all the modern enhancements anyone could want. Now, 1992’s Truxton II (known as Japan as Tatsujin Oh, or literally (‘Expert King’) gets the treatment, which should delight fans of the genre.

What makes the game’s arrival noteworthy is that Truxton II has long eluded a stateside release. Although the title did get a respectable port for the FM Towns personal computer, there’s never been an easy way for Westerners to officially play the vertically scrolling shooter. While Bitwave’s emulation originally dispensed a slipshod rendition of the game’s FM synthesis-driven soundtrack, that’s been mercifully remedied with a recent patch. Now, Truxton II’s unflinching difficulty might be the only caveat.

Keep Dreaming About That 1CC

Building on the foundation of its 1988 predecessor, Truxton II’s six stages are remarkably lengthy, with a full playthrough requiring about an hour of time. Between formations of flying fodder, the game likes to toss several elevated enemies on-screen. Sure, they’re not quite imposing enough to be called mid-bosses. But when you’re tackling a group of foes who can fire a volley of projectiles at any angle, Truxton II nurtures a feeling of vulnerability.

Your ship, the HyperFighter One has several powerful offensive possibilities. Like its predecessor, there are three different kinds of color-coded power-ups that can augment your persistent main gun. The red napalm fires in up six directions with your shots leaving residue that can damage adversaries. The green spread shot provides a wider arc of fire that’s particularly useful against popcorn enemies. And then, there’s the blue homing lasers, that automatically lock onto opponents. While the weapon isn’t quite as powerful as its appearance in the first Truxton, you can lock onto enemies who are beneath you, providing an invaluable advantage.

Expectedly, you can increase the dominance of each type of weapon by collecting additional floating icons of the same color. But a collision with an airborne enemy or one of their projectiles can undo all your power-up progress- and it feels appropriately demoralizing. Mercifully, you won’t have to restart the entire stage. Truxton II does employ regular checkpointing to ensure play feels strenuous but not punishing. The game has two additional power-ups that will augment the movement speed of your ship and give you additional bombs.

A Swarm of Supplementals

When it comes to extras, Bitwave Games doesn’t skimp. Beyond the ability to play the different regional variations (EU, JP, and US), there’s access to simulated DIP switches, so you can tweak difficulty, the starting number of ships, and extra life thresholds. But even on its easiest level of challenge, Truxton II is no pushover. Visual options are plentiful, offering everything from screen rotation to the ability to switch between different aspect ratios.

Options to emulate the look of different monitors are granular, with access to everything from virtual scanlines, vignetting, ghosting, and saturation. It’s so intricate that presets would have assistive. Similarly, you can also fine-tune the game’s FM synthesis audio, adding everything from echo, reverb, as well as low- and high-pass filtering. If you opt to not play in tate mode, Truxton II even lets you customize the screen with different borders and overlays that can display everything from basic instructions to music visualizers. Oddly, the scoring data that was present in Batsugun is missing here. But given the game’s eight-dollar price, and the lack of noticeable lag, this remains an impressive offering. Save for a front-end that unifies all of Bitwave’s Toaplan ports, a retro fan couldn’t ask for more.

Truxton II was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.