Thanks to Bitwave Games for the review code

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

Story

In this early Toaplan shooter, you take control of a transforming ship as you aim to destroy a super computer! Anything remotely close to a plot or more context doesn’t exist in this arcade original, so just go and shoot in one of the earliest Toaplan titles!

Presentation

The same usual Bitwave features apply: varying borders, filters, scaling options, and a fair amount of accessibility options including the visible hitbox toggle. Being that this is a fairly early game from Toaplan’s lineup, it looks a lot simpler from the other shooters currently available on steam, but Slap Fight still manages to maintain a bright style that holds up well today, and the gradius style HUD is integrated well enough that it doesn’t feel like a distraction when playing.

The music is also pretty solid, with incredibly catchy PSG tunes that jump up from the previous Tiger Heli in quality, and like most of the Bitwave games that part of the audio is brought over fairly well. Unfortunately, poor sound effect emulation makes a comeback here, and with Slap Fight’s PSG style the difference between this port and other, more authentic reissues becomes a lot more obvious. The shot and explosion sounds are very off pitch, and the little text scroll that plays before you start a game sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Considering both the Evercade and the Egret II Mini releases nailed the sound effects, I was immensely disappointed to hear such terrible PSG sound effect quality, especially when the music part was just fine…

Gameplay

Slap Fight is a vertical scrolling shooter, where the main objective is to travel across a big, lengthy world while shooting down hordes of enemies, defeating big bosses that get in your way, and picking up dropped stars from enemies to upgrade your ship, Gradius style. You have a power meter at the bottom of the screen, and stockpiling stars is essential to building a useful loadout.

By default, your main shot isn’t really that bad, and does great work with taking out the basic foes, but your starting speed is absolutely pitiful, so grabbing stars for that aspect is the first thing to focus on, and then you have several handy upgrades to choose from once you build up enough stars. There’s the ever useful Side shot, which shoots to your sides and takes out enemies that you might otherwise miss with your main weapon, the laser shot, which pierces and does a good chunk of damage to bosses, but is rather thin and tough to use on hordes of enemies, the bomb, which creates a big radius with your shots and is great for said hordes, and then the homing missiles, which work wonders on some groups of enemies, and miserable on others and most bosses. Also like in Gradius, saving enough stars can be used to get you a temporary shield, though it wears off very fast.

The game scrolls as one continuous stage, just like Tiger-Heli and Xevious before it, with different areas each with their own boss to fight, so the action is consistent and very fun. Scoring is pretty easy to pull off in the game as well, with some cool bonuses hidden about if you know where to look, along with how certain sections of the game reward you for going with a certain loadout, usually one that’s the most beneficial to taking out that area’s boss. You upgrade, shoot, try to avoid having your bigger ship be a bigger target, and slowly work your way further and further within the game to try and take out the evil super computer at the very end.

There are no continues, so if you want to see the ending, you either go nuts with the returning accessibility options like rewind/slowdown/speedup, fiddle around in the practice mode, or just train yourself to make the most out of that 1CC; which is honestly where Slap Fight really shines, and I had a lot of fun playing this again for the leaderboards, even with the very obnoxious audio errors, which really pains me to say since if those were smoothed out, this would easily be a must-own port of the game, as the input is smooth as butter and it includes both regional versions of the game and DIP switch options, although I couldn’t particularly notice any differences between Slap Fight or Alcon. Still, once you get into Slap Fight, the simplicity does a lot to push you toward making another attempt at that fabled 1CC victory, or just go for the highest score!

Conclusion

This port of Slap Fight pains me to dislike, because of all the games in this second volume, it manages to be the most unfun of the bunch due to the horrible PSG sound effect emulation. Despite being a rather simplistic, yet addicting shooter with not much to it besides a great gameplay loop, I’m bewildered that shipping a port with ear-bleeding pitch inaccuracies in the sound effects was ever deemed acceptable, and while recent launch-window patches made these a bit better, it still pales in comparison to the versions available on the Egret II and Evercade. The music is fine, and even the other Bitwave ports I noticed with inaccurate sound are usually off in a way that I feel newcomers would typically ignore, but Slap Fight’s sound effects were just done so, so poorly here.

Which honestly, is just disappointing, since buried underneath bad sound emulation is a stellar game that takes the Gradius formula and clones it almost perfectly for a vertical shooter, with lots of choices for your loadout, some strategy for dealing with the enemies and obstacles coming your way, and a brief, yet addicting gameplay loop that’s perfect for the online leaderboards here or that “one more try” sensation. Alas, while this controls smooth as butter and I cannot recommend the game enough, maybe hold off on this port until the sound effects won’t drill a hole into your brain.

I give Slap Fight a 4 out of 10.