Apidya’ Special review

Most shoot ‘em ups are content with sending space ships through starry battlefields. Apidya’ Special replaces the customary enemy armadas with everything from bees, bees, mosquitoes, fish, frogs, and one particularly deadly cricket. But this ecosystem is poised to evoke memories. Yes, this is essentially Gradius with bugs. And I’m completely OK with that concept, although I will miss the quirkiness that the Moai added to the game.

The original Apidya was released for the Amiga in 1992, by a German studio named Kaiko (literally a silkworm in Japanese, but is a term that can also used to describe nostalgia). The game’s fever-dream story tells of Ikuro, whose wife is poisoned by a dark sorcerer. The husband responds like any rational person would by transforming into a heavily armed bee. Yes, I miss the era when plotlines were invented to justify a game about insects with guns, which is a bit of kaiko, I suppose.

More That Just a Superfluous Apostrophe

Pleasingly, Apidya’ Special isn’t an emulated re-release. Instead, Team Apidya reconstructed the entire game from scratch, combining artwork from the Amiga original with assets created for an abandoned console conversion. The result is a remake that retains the personality of its source material while giving the horizontally-scrolling stages a bit of beautification.

Undoubtedly, the Gradius comparison is most evident in the game’s power-up system. Defeated enemies occasionally drop flowers that advance a selector that runs across a weapon bar. Activating the highlighted slot can do things like increase Ikuro’s speed, add bombs, widen his spread shot, summon drones, or even provide a shield. Saving flowers for a more better enhancement injects the familiar risk of being underpowered as you wait for a bigger offensive payout. Sure, it’s a thirty-one year old concept, but it remains an intriguing mechanic.

Getting Lost in the Weeds

Mercifully, death isn’t quite as painful as Apidya’s peers. Losing a life weakens your weapons, leaving you less capable but it’s not a complete reset. This builds the tense of tension common in many retro shooters. The better you perform, the easier the game becomes. Yet, a single mistake can lead to a succession of demoralizing deaths. It’s one of those classical design decisions that delivers a gratifying sense of momentum while gradually escalating the stakes.

Beyond a nod to Gradius, there’s also a bit of R-Type to be found. Holding the fire button readies a forward-firing projectile that can clear a formation of foes or inflict a significant amount of damage to larger foes. Since charging temporarily restricts your core offense, usefulness depending on knowing when to deploy your bee-spear. Meanwhile, Ikuro handles responsively, with his relatively small size and nimble movement allowing for some satisfying escapes when the screen becomes filled with projectiles.

That said, collections with parts of the environment are overly strict, especially when you’re taking on ground-based foes like snails. Another issue might be intention. Instead of the easily read starfields and caverns of Gradius, Apidya’s flora-filed environments can be harder to read. Green colored bugs are camouflaged in the grassy reeds, causing the sporadic frustration as you collide with a opponents like a high-jumping cricket. Still, the game’s five core stages (there are also plenty of hidden ones as well as nighttime variations) that send you through a meadow, pond, sewer, cyber chamber, and lair area are all lushly detailed. They look great in Special’s new widescreen output.

Beauty and the Bee-st

Yes, you can toggle on-the-fly between Apidya’s old and new visuals to appreciate the increased fidelity and additional layers of parallax. Now, the meadows look especially lush with swaying stalks, flowers filling the foreground, and insects that all look a bit more menacing. As much as I respect the old Amiga workhouse, Apidya’ Special pushes past the capabilities of Denise and Lisa (the names given to Commodore’s graphic chips).

But that’s not the only modern amenity. Optional CRT shaders can simulate scanlines, shadow-mask patterns, and phosphor bloom. Alongside Practice, Easy, and more demanding settings, you can adjust the number of starting lives, alter the score thresholds for earning extras, retain weapon upgrades after death. Anyone primarily interested in seeing every stage can also activate God mode.

Apidya’s audio gets an optional augmentation that lets you select between Chris Hülsbeck’s new arrangements and tracks that preserve the original Amiga soundtrack. There’s even a 50 FPS option is you’re a stickler that wants to reproduce the timing of the European release. I didn’t get to try out the new local co-op mode that lets a partner control Ikuro’s helper drones, but I always appreciate asymmetrical options. This seems like a perfect way to get younger players hooked on shooters.

Feel Ikuro’s Sting

Apidya’ Special proves that Kaiko’s shooter deserved to crawl it’s out of the Amiga’s back catalog. Boasting demanding action, a familiar power-up system, and superb Hülsbeck soundtrack, this is a shooter built on solid foundations and thoughtfully improved for modern audiences. Anyone you appreciates shooting Darius’ robo-fish or flying the Vic Viper will appreciate this remake that’s buggy in all the right places.

Apidya’ Special was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.