Thanks to Bitwave Games for the review code
Title: VIMANA
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $7.99
Release Date: 02/01/2024
Story
In this space shooter, you take control of a ship that must set out to destroy evil alien forces that have returned! Per the usual norm here, there’s no plot in the game at all, and the Arcade flyer explains all there is to this one.
Presentation
The usual Bitwave features return! Great scaling and filter options come back, with audio emulation that while mostly solid the first go around, got even better after some pre-launch patches dropped, leading to this sounding pretty close to videos of the PCB I played for comparison.
Being that this game never got a home port or even ported to anything like a mini or compilation, Vimana is a very obscure shooter, and it makes a great first impression with an outstanding stage 1 theme that really does motivate you to go ahead and start shooting your way through space. The ship design and charge shots are flashy, and some of the bosses are pretty bizarre looking, but cool!. Sadly, a lot of the game’s backgrounds and stages look rather generic, and after the first stage the music becomes a lot less exciting, though still very good by Arcade standards. It looks solid for a Toaplan game of the era, but definitely doesn’t maintain the high energy of its contemporaries.
Gameplay
Vimana is a vertical shooter, tasking you with going through several stages with your trusty ship, able to fire a charge shot that spreads, or deploy a protective barrier that homes in on enemies. You shoot down waves of foes accordingly, and make your way to the bosses of each stage. Seeing that the bombs are replaced by the barrier, I was expecting this one to be a bit trickier than the other Toaplan shooters, but honestly Vimana is a lot easier starting out than some of Toaplan’s other shooters. Not only does rapidfire help immensely here, but the charge shot spreads nice and wide, and does great work on hordes of enemies, helping for scoring purposes as well.
Progressing through the stages, you get a decent assortment of shot upgrades, bonus points, and the occasional shield drop, but otherwise the stages are rather lacking in my opinion. The outstanding music and cool bosses you fight are memorable highlights to Vimana, but the actual stages connecting them are just really dull, feeling rather easy until the halfway point of the game. Honestly, I think this stems from your charge shot being a bit too strong, since it works wonders against waves of enemies, and it takes until bigger, bulkier enemies and bosses show up for the game to put up much of a fight on the default settings.
I definitely had moments where I felt near invincible until dying to a boss and burning through my lives on a long fight, but even with practice this shooter is one I feel you can slowly master with a lot more ease than the other Toaplan games so far. It even has two player co-op, which just makes things even more stress free.
Honestly, I can see why Vimana didn’t get a reissue until now. It’s a fine shooter with a great charge shot and outstanding music and boss designs, but there really isn’t much else to it. I’m struggling to really note mechanics and level layout aspects, since pretty much all of it feels like filler until you get to one of the cool bosses. At least being a Toaplan game, the shooting is still fun, and the bitwave port provides super high response times, so the tight controls feel good here. Otherwise, the online leaderboards are the main draw to this one.
Conclusion
Vimana is one of Toaplan’s more obscure shooters, and one I was finally happy to play as part of the recent wave of Bitwave ports. The excellent response time and solid emulation leads to this being a pretty decent port, and even the audio oddities I noticed were all pretty much fixed right before launch, leading to this port coming out in damn good shape!
Ultimately though, the epic music and fun charge mechanic can only do so much for a game that just doesn’t nail the meticulous nature of prior Toaplan shooters, and while it is a fun romp that’s still decent for scoring purposes, I didn’t find this one to click with me nearly as much as some of their other shooters, including their earlier stuff like Sky Shark.
Dull stages, lack of powerup variety (consisting of just shot upgrades), and a pretty slow ramp of the difficulty really only leaves you with a solid vertical shooter and an outstanding soundtrack to keep you motivated to power to the very end. Still, considering the outstanding quality of the Toaplan games that came before and after Vimana, it really does feel like an outlier and a game that may have been buried for a reason. A fun history piece, but one you might get bored with more than the others.
I give Vimana a 6 out of 10.