Twin Cobra Review: The Weakest Of The Bunch

Of the four retro shooters Bitwave Games are releasing today from Toaplan, Twin Cobra may sadly be my least favorite. Which is a shame because it’s a SHMUP where you get to control a helicopter, and there simply aren’t enough of those. I love that it has a slightly different take on the genre, but the actual feel of playing it simply doesn’t hold up.

We Need More Helicopters

Controlling a helicopter doesn’t ultimately make Twin Cobra feel that different from any other SHMUP, and sadly the game ultimately never really finds much of an identity. This is a very basic shooter, with four types of ammo and bombs available to you to take out foes both on air and on the ground. Anyone who has put significant time into Capcom’s fighter pilot games of the era, such as 1943, will find this all very familiar, but actually playing the game doesn’t feel anywhere near as good.

The biggest issue is that your helicopter always just feels too slow. Some might enjoy a slightly more cerebral feel, but the issue is that your opponents don’t seem to have gotten the memo, and they move far faster than you. Difficulty is standard with SHMUPs, but this feels unbalanced. Yes, like the other Toaplan games releasing today, there’s a ton of qualify of life upgrades here, like rewind and the option to turn on automatic dodging, but when the game is this unbalanced in its default form, it’s not ideal. The developers have to have known this in its original release period. Unlike most of Toaplan’s shooters, death doesn’t set you back to a checkpoint or earlier in the level. A continue lets you pick up right where you died, allowing anyone to finish the game. You just might die a million times along the way.

A Rocking Soundtrack

Great presentation can help overcome a lot of issues, but that’s not the case here either. Everything from the levels you fly over, to enemy fighters, and your own helicopter looks super generic. Nothing here stands out. Well, that’s not true. The one saving grace of Twin Cobra is a downright fantastic soundtrack that gets the blood pumping and helped me push my way through a game I never had much fun with. I loved listening to the music here, I’d just far rather do so without having to play the game that accompanies it.

Like all of these releases, the quality-of-life options here are very nicely implemented. In addition to the previously mentioned rewind and automatic dodging options, you have save states, leaderboards, a fantastic practice mode, and all kinds of ways to customize the look and feel of the game. I wish I could say that searching through them presented ways to make this feel like a better game than it is, but at best, these options allowed me to mitigate some of Twin Cobra’s flaws.

Conclusion

I can usually find something to enjoy in most any SHMUP, but outside of a killer soundtrack, there wasn’t much that redeemed Twin Cobra for me. The basics all more or less work, it isn’t broken, and there are certainly worse games out there, but there’s nothing it does particularly well, and the slow speed of your ship gets old very quickly, as do the bland looking levels. There are a couple of gems in this set of Toaplan shooters Bitwave Games are releasing today, but Twin Cobra simply isn’t one of them.

Final Verdict: 2/5

Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Bitwave Games; Developer: Bitwave Games, Toaplan; Players: 1; Released: February 14th, 2023; ESRB: TBA; MSRP: $7.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a copy of Twin Cobra provided by the publisher.