Thanks to Bitwave Games for the review code

Title: Flying Shark
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $7.99
Release Date: 08/24/2023

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Story

In this vertical shooter, you take control of a plane that sets out to defeat waves of evil enemies! Really, the plot here is all in the background, and just like other titles from this simpler time, you’re just meant to be shooting and scoring! Though this port in general has a bit more prelude information to discuss, for this Steam release is part of the second volume of Bitwave Toaplan ports! I covered the first volume earlier this year, and now Bitwave are back with four more Toaplan shooters, with this being the one I chose to cover first. Prior to this, I played quite a decent bit of Sky/Flying Shark on the Evercade, a real cabinet and the M2 collection, so how does Bitwave’s port compare to those experiences?

Presentation

Just like before, this Bitwave port contains a good bit of presentational options to tinker with, including the return of the solid CRT filter, scaling options, visible hitbox toggles, TATE mode, border/game stat displays, and even a Wide Screen hack akin to what was done in Twin Cobra’s port. Generally, I found these options to work pretty good on a visual level, and there’s even an option to more closely mimic the speed of the original arcade cabinet rather than a locked 60hz, which I much appreciated. I haven’t been able to play my local cab in a good while, but when comparing this port with my memories of a recent marathon session on said machine, the Steam port still felt a tiny bit faster even on the original speed setting, which seems to mirror the slight speed increase from original hardware the last volume had reports on.

With all that said, I still feel that even this speed quirk isn’t likely to be a dealbreaker for most people, and honestly the bigger, more pressing issue with the presentation here comes from the audio accuracy. I noted in my volume 1 reviews that the music was horrifically bugged pre-launch, but got swiftly patched right before launch, but what I didn’t realize at the time was how a lot of the sound effects in those games were still off-pitch even after the patches came out. Having little experience with the original versions of those four games made me not realize that fact until people on forums and my shmup circles pointed it out, so I made sure to have the other versions I had of Flying Shark on standby to see if the sound effects were off, and whoo boy, they absolutely were.

Key word being were, since even up to the day I drafted this review, this port was getting patches and came in incredibly hot (along with some other aspects I’ll note later), going from extremely choppy sound effects, (with the death explosion sound and bombs sounding like they were stuttering messes) to something less choppy, but still off from the versions I had access to elsewhere. Most things seem to sound fine now, but the explosion sounds are still the key audio aspect that I notice being emulated poorly here, which is rather disappointing considering how Volume 1 launched with similar issues, and unlike those games, I feel an ordinary player would be able to notice the choppier, weird sounding pitch with the sound effects. Thankfully, the music is preserved faithfully and is still as rocking as ever, and like before there’s even a sound test to listen to said music and SE at any time. (which is also what helped me to notice the sound effect inaccuracies a lot quicker)

Gameplay

Flying Shark is a vertical shmup, and Toaplan’s first with FM audio, where the main objective is to fly throughout each of the five stages while shooting down enemies in your way! Pretty typical shooter stuff here, and you don’t even get differing weapons, since your main upgrade just adds extra range to your main shot, which does a great job of taking down enemies and is very satisfying to hit them with. Like a lot of Toaplan shooters, you also have bombs at your disposal, with these unleashing a circular fire that deal a lot of damage to multi-hit foes while also protecting you from incoming bullets. With those few mechanics, all you have to do is just fly and shoot!

Honestly, Flying Shark’s simplicity is the strongest aspect of it at the end of the day, since the lack of alternate weapons may seem like a bummer at first, but your main shot is surprisingly decent and does a good enough job of fighting foes, even without any upgrades; no bullet sponges or nightmare recovery scenarios here! The bombs are rather useful here too, with their circular pattern bringing immense satisfaction when using it against bulkier enemies or waves of planes, allowing you too easily rack up those points.

Like in Tiger-Heli, a lot of the environments are destructible, and thus it also becomes rather amusing to just lay waste to all the anti-air buildings housing tanks, even if doing so will likely open you up to more enemy fire. It adds a bit of risk to racking up points, but becomes immensely satisfying to pull off. If the difficulty does manages to bother you, the usual rewind, slowdown, DIP Switches, practice mode and hitbox visibility features all help make this port a good way to learn the game.

When it comes to the control of the port and any gameplay tweaks it offers, Flying Shark continues the Bitwave tradition of having everything control smooth as butter; the response time is quick, movement is satisfying and they even finally fixed the issue I noted from the last volume where the normal shot button would stop working upon setting an autofire command, allowing for great, comfortable control. (Though a new bug popped up, where the added Coin setting will just lead to the normal shot button also doubling as the insert coin button if you toggle the coin setting to manual. This is immensely annoying, and honestly makes no sense as to why both shot and coin are the same command, though luckily the default Automatic coin feature from the last volume is still here, and the normal shot works just fine here with that enabled.)

Really at the end of it all, the biggest problem with this port of Flying Shark was the sound effect audio: I already noted the odd sound effect errors earlier, and while it does seem like an earnest effort is being made to improve on this aspect, I am still rather disappointed to see such a great game ship out with such a buggy core feature. The music is still fine, but for a game about blowing up tanks and buildings with bombs for points, hearing stuttery, inaccurate explosion sound effects will just break the immersion entirely, and honestly soured my time with this port despite it controlling great and having nice bonuses.

Also like with the prior Bitwave releases, Flying Shark offers the other regional variants of the game: all of which work as they should with the Japanese version being a bit harder on the default settings, and even having its own leaderboard (though for some reason, they don’t actually work when playing with the JP rom, as of the time of this review) The Wide Screen display option is also a cool addition, but like with Twin Cobra’s implementation, it leads to a lot of annoying moments where enemies just pop into existence and suddenly kill you, so that mode still has a lot of work to go through before it can be considered an improved experience.

Conclusion

In the end, Flying/Sky Shark is an incredibly fun shooter, and one of Toaplan’s best early titles, with a fun scorechasing aspect that really benefits from the online leaderboards and practice options Bitwave added to this port, but unfortunately suffers from an annoying amount of bugs that makes the port feel as if it came out of the oven very hot, most notably the irritating pitch problems on those sound effects, which once you notice them, you’ll never un-notice.

The input response time is still magnificent, and the shooting action is still just as fun as ever to play even despite these problems, so I can at least recommend this game for fans of Toaplan or arcade shooters to give a try, but honestly I can’t help but be a bit bummed that we are many months out from the first volume launching, yet the second volume still has issues and oddities I noted all the way back in the first one. Heck, even some new, post-launch additions like the Manual coin option being bugged is enough to make me scratch my head!

If this ends up getting smoothed out and polished, you’ll have one of Toaplan’s best scorechasers available for easy online leaderboard fun at a steal of a price, and as a very easy recommend for newcomers to their shooters. Still, that dreadful explosion stutter is just so painful to witness and see still make it out into the launch build, so if you do nab it now, maybe play this game at a lower volume than you normally would…

I give Flying Shark a 5 out of 10.