Thanks to ININ Games for the review code

Title: Over Horizon x Steel Empire
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $14.99
Release Date: 07/18/2024

---

Story

In this retro compilation of HOT-B Shooters, you take control of a space ship to destroy bad ships in Over Horizon… And fight against evil forces using steam powered airships in Steel Empire! Neither really have much of a story (Over Horizon doesn’t seem to have one at all), though Steel Empire at least has mission briefing scenes between the stages. Still, the shooting action is the main focus, so I don’t mind this being lacking.

Presentation

The usual Ratalaika wrapper returns, with a very basic language select menu leading into a very basic game select menu. You have some of the usual screen and display options, but no scanned materials of any sort, which is rather disappointing. The screen options are fine as they tend to be, and even the GBA filter manages to have a neat toggle to reproduce the ghosting of GBA games, which works beautifully with the GBA Steel Empire. Still, the wrapper feels rather phoned in here and doesn’t even have much charm to it like the Parasol Stars one did.

The games themselves look fine for the time they came out in. Over Horizon is a late era NES game and looks like a space shooter would, invoking mild Konami vibes to me, while the GBA Steel Empire looks like your typical GBA port with brighter colors and a squished playfield. (though it being more of a remake mitigates the screen crunch by a lot more than you’d usually expect) The Genesis Steel Empire on the other hand, looks phenomenal. Great use of colors and shading and gorgeous stage backgrounds and visual effects. Having only played the remake from a decade ago, I was impressed by how well this original version held up, and how that remake ended up taking more from the GBA version than the Genesis one.

The music is another category these games mostly nail. Over Horizon has some catchy, also Konami/Natsume-esque tunes, while Genesis Steel Empire has some absolutely god tier music that quickly shot up to being one of my favorite OSTs from the entire Genesis. Seriously, you can tell the Langrisser guy composed it, and every track is just magnificent, with great sound effects to back up the action.

Considering I found the remake OST to be a bit generic, I was very happy with this discovery, and the music thankfully sounds just as it should. The GBA version has the same tunes but way worse sounding due to the hardware, but I feel they at least tried to do the best they could here. Still, the Genesis version is by far the best treat to the ears in this set.

Gameplay

Right before we get to the games themselves, I have to vent about this darn wrapper a bit. Not just because it’s pretty generic and has the same safe options we usually see from Ratalaika, but because a lot of it feels unusually sloppy this time around. You can only map two buttons to an action at one time, and trying to demap a button when a mapping is filled up doesn’t work for whatever reason. So if you have A and B assigned to the shoot button, you can’t just go back and hit A or B to deassign it, you’ll have to work your way to another command, hit A or B to move it off the button, then work from there. I don’t know why this is as I had no issue demapping buttons in other Ratalaika ports.

There’s also the fact that some of the visual options are weird in some games. One game let me cycle through the generic starry night background and a black void by hitting right on the D-Pad, while the others just had me toggle with left and right like you normally would in these sets.

The rewind feature is weird in this one too, with Over Horizon allowing you to change rewind speed, but Steel Empire not allowing you to at all, with Genesis Steel Empire being an Adaptive speed rewind and GBA Steel Empire forcing you to do a times 1 speed rewind. I do not know why you can’t have all the rewind speeds equal and I’m seriously concerned if somehow faster rewind would make the GBA game act more weird than it already does.

Lastly, the. button remapping in Genesis Steel Empire appears to be really weird to the point the game will just ignore it at times. I tried mapping the buttons to match the Genesis ABC layout, then used the in-game button remapping to change my controls like I would on the original Genesis, but as soon as I hit Stage 2 it freaked out and went back to the button mappings present in the menu… So B and A were left and right shot again despite me remapping them to Y and B in the game’s option menu. So I guess you can’t use the in-game button remapping despite the game letting you do so. Still, it makes me ponder yet again if Ratalaika is being crunched out the door to finish these ports, and oddities like this soured my experience.

There’s also a challenge mode here where you play the game without save states, but it’s almost entirely useless here since there aren’t any online leaderboards in the slightest, and it seems more tailored to the PS4 version which would lock trophies behind this mode. Here on Switch… A self-imposed challenge I guess? It boasts local score saving, but you can do that easily with a save state anyhow…

---

Over Horizon (NES)- An 8-bit NES shooter… With some interesting twists! OK, well if you play the game normally you’ll probably not see much that’ll blow your mind. Some greats music, interesting layering effects, and cool weapons that make taking on the bosses and enemies a fun trip. The game isn’t too easy, but not too tough either, and all feels fun and balanced in this six stage romp. I can’t say I was that impressed at first besides it being a fine shooter.

But then you go to Edit mode. And that’s where the game gets insane in all the right ways. Those powerups you normally get? You can combine their attributes to make your own weapon, like a homing laser or exploding fireball! You can even adjust your option positions freely, and pretty much place them anywhere you want them to spawn. And then you save this info, go back to the main game and whoa, that main game is insanely, ridiculously easy now. But it’s way more chaotic and interesting due to all the powerup potential you now have to play with, along with your options.

Speaking of options, you get them the way you typically would from a game like this, via drops from enemies. And what you were meant to originally do was hit both buttons at the same time to change their position, but for some reason that doesn’t seem to work in this port as the feature has been assigned to its own button now. Annoying, but whatever, it still works and this customization just rules, making Over Horizon a very customizable and fun shooter. I certainly had an interesting time with it!

This game also has the most bonuses/toggles of the trio here. From a new optional HUD that displays your speed and lives at all times, along with various cheats like a sound test and level skips, and even a crazy Samurai mode that replaces a bunch of sprites in the game with wacky stuff, Over Horizon is a true gem I was very happy to play for the first time here. Just a shame the wrapper is a little bit sloppy, but at least this one made it out pretty much perfectly. Oddly no EU version included though, just the original Japanese, but you don’t have text to read here.

Steel Empire (Genesis)- The biggest surprise of the bunch! A very fun shooter that felt familiar at first to that remake I played so, so long ago… Only for me to get the boss and realize it was completely different. And the music being as outstanding as it was, too. You have two ships to choose from, and a forward shot, back shot and a super bomb to deploy, and while there’s no custom speed or weapon modes like in Over Horizon, this is still a very fun shooter, with excellent balancing and just a lot of fun to be had here.

It definitely has a different flavor to that of Over Horizon; I don’t even think these were made by the same developer. Still, you have multiple stages of shooting action, two different ships to play with for some extra replay value, and an interesting level up mechanic and some very limited bombs to keep you on your toes. Make sure you use that screen clear only where you’re in absolute danger, and you’ll have a blast here.

Unfortunately, this is where I encountered that weird button remapping bug trying to use the in-game button remapping, so you’re better off sticking with the wrapper’s button mapping for this title to avoid that weird bug. Compared to the remakes, I feel this ended up being the best version by far, though not that I can praise the GBA version much here, since..

Steel Empire (GBA)– God. Christ. Urgh. ININ/Ratalaika rushing strikes again with this game in particular. But first, the main game. It’s Steel Empire, but readjusted to the GBA with some gameplay mechanic changes and completely different bosses. This felt WAY more familiar to me because it literally is the exact same game as the remake, meaning this is where the level design of that version comes from!

Plays surprisingly well for a GBA port and the screen crunch didn’t bother me much here at all, and while I vastly preferred the Genesis version to this GBA port in the end, it’s a fascinating curio into what would become the 3DS remake I covered earlier in my site’s run, which also got a Switch port earlier this year.

Unfortunately, Ratalaika and ININ seem to have done something weird with the emulator here, since for some weird reason this game has horrific slowdown. I don’t mean the typical slowdown the other games have in spots, that’s the normal slowdown from back in the day. I mean like, seconds long periods of the game just dumping frames with almost nothing on screen happening. I tried to look everywhere to see if this was the original EU version and just a quirk of the GBA port, but to my shock, no! Multiple gameplay videos from the GBA cart on original hardware had a complete lack of the slowdown like you see in the video below.

So yeah. That ain’t normal slowdown. And I could reproduce it with my filters off by rewinding and replaying the first stage as the other ship. It just wanted me to have very jarring, weird periods of slowdown at certain points in the game. Quite frankly, when your GBA emulation causes weird frame dips that make Super R-Type on SNES look fast, that’s enough for me to really give a side eye to this.

Still, I made it to the same stage as I did on the MD version, and yeah, there’s more slowdown, and it’s nasty like that sometimes. It really doesn’t seem to happen on the original hardware to this degree, so I don’t like it. Easily the big reason to avoid this version on this compilation, which is a shame as for a GBA port from 2004, it’s fairly well made. I did find it funny though that booting the game up loads a save state past the publisher logo in this version of the game, but doing so on the JP version skips you past the first part of the intro as well. Pretty sloppy compared to just editing the ROM or at least keeping the publisher skip consistent. Maybe this is why the game slows down?

Conclusion

Much as I hoped Parasol Stars was a sign that ININ/Ratalaika ports were trending in the right direction, here’s the Over Horizon/Steel Empire combo to bring my optimism on these ports crashing down, down, down to earth again.

Over Horizon, is a decent little game! Not worth the absurd prices on the aftermarket, but this port should be a solid way to get into the game… If it wasn’t for the whole sloppy feeling of the package. No bonus materials of any kind, not even the EU version to poke at here, and while the extra toggles for OH to enable the cool samurai mode are nice, it feels inconsistent compared to the other games, where they don’t have any sort of toggle for the in-game stage select or debug menus, despite having in-game toggle for Over Horizon cheats. It feels weirdly inconsistent and again, sloppy.

The Steel Empire for Genesis? Absolute gem of a game I enjoyed immensely and had fun playing with here. Ran mostly like it should outside of the weird rewind speed and inconsistent toggles/button remap bug, but the godlike music makes this the one to jump for the most outta all the games in the package. Easy recommendation if the compilation wasn’t bugged.

And speaking of bugged… Steel Empire GBA. That slowdown man. The fact it absolutely does not seem to be there on original hardware, and somehow nobody caught that this GBA emulator drops frames on a shooty shoot game from 2004 is just utterly ridiculous. It still isn’t the best version of the game, but man if you also aren’t gonna include archival materials or any sort of cool bonuses, or even online leaderboards, at least make sure the game runs hardware accurate. I can’t believe we’re at this point again.

So yeah. You get an outstanding shooter, a decent fun one, and a very weirdly emulated GBA port here, with no extra features and a very sloppy wrapper. And for $14.99, you deserve better, way better. And considering how many ININ reissues are still awaiting patches for bug fixes (Jajamaru is 1.5 years old! Turrican got bugged a year ago on PS4 via a patch! Irem 1 is still broken!), I have little faith the GBA Steel Empire quirk will be fixed in a timely manner. But who knows! Maybe I’m wrong, and all three games will be polished up to snuff.

But for now, you’re only able to really get the most outta one, and even the one with just button mapping oddities still has a lot of fun to offer. Nevertheless, I can’t say that this triple pack is worth the money for the amount of polish these games were given. A little disgraceful honestly, and a big shame with how great these shooters are.

I give Over Horizon X Steel Empire a 4 out of 10.