Thank you Bitwave Games for sending us this game to review!

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Toaplan released several well regarded shoot 'em ups for arcades and video game consoles from the time. One of the games that became unintentionally famous years later was Zero Wing. Back in the early 1990s, video game translations were not always written by professional localizers, but sometimes by that one guy on the development team who knows some English. Zero Wing's European release on the Sega Mega Drive was one such release, with a hilariously bad English translation that later spawned a classic meme 'All Your Base Are Belong To Us'. (It was also released on PC Engine in Japan.) This intro scene is not present on the Arcade original, so it is missing from this PC release as of the writing of this review. However, Bitwise Games and Toaplan understand how important this intro is to fans, so they have promised that a free patch is incoming that will include 'All Your Base' in some fashion in the future.

Outside of the meme that the game spawned, Zero Wing is a solid side-scrolling shoot 'em up in the vain of other classics like R-Type, Gradius, or Darius. The plot is rather simple, and only explained in the console releases. An alien race called CATS are invading us, and we must use the last remaining ZIG to defeat the enemy invading force. Shoot 'em ups don't need much plot!

Your ZIG includes two additional firing pods, so you can shoot three bullets at a time. There are three different weapon upgrades: red, blue, and green. Red is a standard straight forward shot, that becomes a spread shot as you pick up more upgrades. Blue is a laser shot that gets thicker with a faster refire rate as you pick up more. Green is a homing shot, that gains larger bullets and fire rate as you gain more upgrades. Given the autofire options available to players, I find the homing shot to be the most powerful.

One feature unique to Zero Wing is the 'Seizer Beam', also known as a tractor beam. This allows you to grab enemies, and fling them forward if you wish. Grabbing them is also quite useful as a defensive mechanism, as they will explode before you do from a direct hit. There is also a bomb pickup that works similarly, except that when it explodes it damages everything in a large area instead of just whatever the thrown ship might collide with. There are also speed up pickups on occasion. Unfortunately, everything resets when you die, so try to avoid those shots as much as you can, even if you have infinite continues/credits.

The emulation on offer is really solid, and it does exactly what you would expect from a modern port. There are several pixel filtering options, from pixel perfect to fuzzy pixels to bilinear filtering to CRT emulation. You can also choose between full screen and pixel perfect screen fill options. There are several background fill options as well, including blank, arcade art, and several functional ones as well. You can save the game state and rewind if you mess up, you can practice the game by choosing whatever level you like, and more. Controller support is excellent, as it supports both raw and Steam input, giving you plenty of choices on how you want to deal with controllers. Even the keyboard works fine. There are native versions available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, which is a really nice touch.

There are eight levels, and depending on your skill level, can take about 30-45 minutes to beat once. When you beat the game, you can continue playing from the beginning at a higher difficulty level, so the game practically never ends unless you want it to.

Enemy variety is all some form of mechanical enemy, with lots of ships of various kinds. It's a blast or be blasted galaxy. This arcade version has the most detailed enemies of all of the original platforms of the day, and its pixel art looks great. The music is a bit simple, as it uses a common FM synth style from the time. It's catchy, but you can definitely tell that the compositions were limited by the hardware. The sound effects get the job done, but again, 1989.

Morally, this game is like every other classic space shoot 'em up. You blast bad guys that are going to try to blast you out of the sky. Thankfully, this game has no unexpected nudity or anything like that. There are no curse words, as the only words in the game are during the ending (at least until the intro scenes are reimplemented via the upcoming patch).

Zero Wing is a faithful modern port of a classic Arcade title from 1989. Toaplan's games from that time have a hardcore following for a reason - they were, and are, fun. While hardly groundbreaking now, Zero Wing is still a solid side-scrolling shoot 'em up that was fun to play then, and still is now. The $7.99 asking price is quite reasonable, and even better, there is a Toaplan Arcade Shoot'em Ups 1 bundle that includes this and three other games that's a 38% bundle discount, bringing the price for all four to $19.80. For that price, assuming the other games are as good as this one, is an easy recommendation for classic shoot 'em up fans.