VASARA Collection

I'll be straight with you: I came to VASARA Collection expecting museum-piece nostalgia bait and left with a legitimate appreciation for what Visco quietly pulled off in 2000 and 2001. These are vertical shooters set in an alternate-history feudal Japan where samurai heroes ride flying motorcycles and fight robotic Tokugawa armies, and that absurd premise ends up holding together better than it has any right to. The mechanical hook that separates VASARA from a generic bullet shower is the chargeable melee attack. Hold the fire button, release it at the right moment, and your character swings a blade or fans that physically deflect incoming projectiles while dealing damage. Build the VASARA gauge by collecting gems dropped from enemies, and you can let loose a supercharged screen-clearing melee strike. VASARA 1 pairs this with a traditional panic bomb; VASARA 2 drops the bomb entirely and gives you up to three stored VASARA charges instead, making it the tighter and more aggressive of the two. The collection's PC port also separates the VASARA attack onto its own button rather than the original arcade's shared input, which is a sensible quality-of-life call that lowers the skill floor just enough to let new players feel the loop before it grinds them down. Character selection matters too: VASARA 1 has three picks (Yukimura, the balanced one; Saiga, the spread-shot speed type; Keiji, the concentrated heavy hitter) each with distinct opening stages and melee animations, while VASARA 2 expands the roster to four plus an unlockable fifth. Different characters genuinely change how aggressively you can melee vs. dodge. Difficulty is arcade-honest, which means brutal. Both titles sit in that uncomfortable middle zone between a traditional shmup and full bullet hell: the bullet counts are dense enough to demand real pattern reading, but the color coding on projectiles is old-school messy rather than the clean pink-and-blue conventions modern players expect. You can continue infinitely without losing progress in most areas, but some later stages reset you to the stage start on death, which will frustrate anyone not already comfortable with credit-feeding discipline. The scoring system rewards melee kills through a Prestige Kill mechanic where flagged enemy drops create chain opportunities, and grazing bullets (passing projectiles through your sprite outside the hitbox) adds another layer for score chasers. It is genuinely deep if you want it to be. The third mode, VASARA Timeless, is the package's weak link. It is a newly built 3D widescreen experience with procedurally generated stages, a dash move, and support for up to four local players simultaneously picking from all nine characters across both games. The expanded horizontal playfield looks decent in motion, but the procedural generation produces sparse, repetitive enemy waves, and the reduced enemy density that comes with going no-continue makes solo play especially flat. With three friends it improves, but compared to the tight handcrafted stages of the originals it feels like a proof-of-concept that ran out of budget. No CRT filter and reportedly baffling leaderboard implementation round out the disappointments on the presentation side. As a PC package this is slim on features. TATE mode is supported for anyone with a monitor that pivots, display borders can be toggled, and a basic smoothing filter is available for people who want softer pixels. That is roughly the extent of it. No button remapping was flagged as an issue at launch, so check your controller compatibility before committing.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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