Title: Truxton II
System: Steam
Price: $7.99
Release Date: 04/08/2024

Story

In this sequel to the legendary Truxton… You take flight and defeat the evil aliens yet again! Not much of a plot, just like in the first game.

This volume of Toaplan ports on the other hand, does have a weird backstory to their release, and I should explain it to note why I’m not spacing out the four of these games over a week like I did with every other volume so far. Simply put, we didn’t get a PR email or review code offer for this volume, nor any notification of the launch date prerelease and any inquiries into checking the volume out haven’t been communicated. This is a very sudden release that just dropped without much of a word, and after playing the port I can absolutely see why.

Considering how Truxton II is infamous for extreme difficulty (even beyond normal Toaplan standards) and how these Bitwave ports have added some QOL here and there, I figured I’d pick one of the four new games and give it a spin to see how I like the port, and well, what better game to check out than the shmup which would benefit the best from QOL?

Presentation

Like the prior Bitwave ports, you have assorted background, screen size and filter options. Nothing new to report here. The game looks as sharp as ever and while it has a more gritty feel compared to earlier Toaplan games, the enemy designs are still excellent and fitting of the brutal challenges that lie ahead.

Unfortunately… And the reason that determined whether this would be more in-depth or a snap judgement review, the audio emulation is yet again borked. Not just “slightly off key”, but ear-bleedingly so. It bothered me to the point I had to rush to make a video of it to share with people to demonstrate just how shrill it sounds.

Now yeah, the original game’s OST is a bit of a departure from the first Truxton soundtrack, with a hard rock vibe that perfectly fits the absurd difficulty of this game. Which is why it pains me to describe the audio emulation as just unbearably, unacceptably awful. Extremely shrill sound channels? Check. Bad audio pitches that sound like a dying Sega Genesis? Check. A Coin sound effect that sounds like it drills into a chalkboard? Also there. In the end the only way I was able to gain any sort of tolerance to play this port at all, was by disabling the BGM in the options menu.

The sound effects are also off, but not enough like the music was to impact my enjoyment. Still, the fact we’re twelve games in, and this set of four has the same issues all twelve of those games launched with in terms of audio bugs, and you have a very frustrating trend that shows no signs of stopping with these bitwave launches. Hell, as I was wrapping up my play session, I figured I’d try the practice mode to go over the QOL aspects, and somehow it makes all the audio even worse?!? Certain sound channels in the music just outright vanish, and it leaves me scratching my head even more. Huge shame considering the solid quality of the actual, normal sounding music.

Gameplay

Just like the original Truxton, Truxton II tasks the player with going through multiple stages and taking out waves of enemies, using three different colored shots and a powerful bomb attack along the way. If you have any familiarity with the original game, then this will be a very quick and easy game to understand.

Until you immediately die. Right off the bat, Truxton II shows off some rather sharp fangs, the kind which give this game its deserved reputation for being Toaplan’s hardest shmup of all time. Sure, Same Same Same was brutal, but the scoring was great fun and the enemy placement and checkpointing was still good enough to make you want to give it one more go, and best your scores while you were at it.

Here in Truxton II, though? Good luck surviving enough to get to the first set of powerups without using your bomb! Thankfully, the super responsive input timing from prior Bitwave Toaplan ports makes a comeback, leading to this version being way smoother to control than the port on the Astro City V, (which pretty much made the entire game impossible to control due to high input lag) making things a little easier.

Still, even if you do get over that hurdle and are generally good at shmups, this entire game requires the most extreme, high precision play imaginable. The stages are long. Very, very long. By the time you finally reach a boss, you’ll have to duel it and be very careful as they fire incredibly fast bullets, and one hit will send you back to a checkpoint a long, long ways back from said boss. The checkpoints are a lot messier than prior toaplan games too, with some being pretty well balanced to letting you recover, while others just feel like death traps where your only hope is to spam the bomb button and pray you can make it to the next one. I consider myself semi-decent at shmups and like to improve my efforts with memorization, and Truxton II just wants you to do to that the extreme.

It doesn’t help that while enemy weapon drops are uncommon enough, bomb drops are practically a unicorn; so those bombs of yours better be used only in emergencies if you’re daring to try and 1CC this… Though even a shmup master probably won’t make it past the second stage trying to do so. The game can get that crazy. The lone way you’ll be able to see the full game, is to play it in local co-op and have a buddy join in. This way, you can credit feed and respawn instantly without a checkpoint, but on the other hand, you lose pretty much all the fun of a shmup. Still, considering how much of an impenetrable wall this game can be playing solo, at least having a friend along to torment with it is a good use of the hour+ it takes to clear a loop of the game. None of that time includes any memorable levels or moments where the game stops getting evil. It pretty much does a lot of things Truxton did, only making them way worse by turning up the difficulty so much to the point it feels like Toaplan forgot to even have a playtester 1CC the game before putting it out in arcades.

Still, that is why despite all the frustrations I have with the absurd challenge level and weird level design, there’s still a gem of an idea here, being that it’s Truxton, and more of it. If QOL was added or some of the tweaks ala the ones made in the M2 collections were done, this game could be toned down enough to a normal Toaplan difficulty level and be a really fun game. I was a bit hopeful Bitwave’s accessibility toggles would mitigate that somewhat, but sadly they’re rather limited, with some options like automatically dodging obstacles being completely absent. You can increase your health, shrink your hitbox, and turn on rewind, but that’s about it besides tweaking DIP settings to make the game a tiny bit easier. Considering that the hitbox was barely the issue with the game’s challenge to begin with, none of these “improvements” really improve the core problems with the game, nor allow for an easier way to get into the game.

You also have the returning practice mode, but just like the prior ports it is rather limited and the only use I found of it during my session was to see just how nastier the later loops of the game got. Spoiler alert; the game ends up feeling even more impossible on the highest loop.

Conclusion

Truxton II is my utter breaking point with these Bitwave ports, and honestly even if all of them were perfect ports with no audio issues, this game would still be a very tough recommendation due to its infamously bad difficulty level and just poor design all around. But when the audio is just utterly desecrated on, the QOL features don’t do much to help make the actual game easier to practice or learn, and the core game itself really isn’t that much fun at all, you have another volume of ports launching with the same (if not worse) kinds of audio issues that plagued twelve other ports originally, and the one game that could have been a shining example of a game given some nice QOL and tweaks to be more enjoyable to newcomers while still being a good scorechaser for the hardcore just ends up being thrown out onto Steam without much of a word. Twenty minutes of this port was all I could handle before sending it back for a refund.

Truxton II deserved better. Hell, Toaplan deserved better. Even if I don’t like the actual game all that much, there’s zero reason for it to sound this horrible and for the lack of care or polish in this port to exist. Considering this is also the first US home version of the game to ever exist, the disappointment grows even stronger that the game just isn’t good nor is the port all that great either.

Absolutely avoid this horrible sounding mess at all costs, and only the absolute diehard should even attempt to give this game a shot and see it through to the end. I did it once on another system, and I never want to do so again. Here’s hoping M2 does this game properly.

I give Truxton II a 2 out of 10.