Irem’s games are celebrated for their technical polish and creative designs, often blending quirky aesthetics with challenging gameplay. The company also developed early arcade hits like Moon Patrol (1982), one of the first side-scrolling shooters, and ventured into console gaming with ports for systems like the PC Engine. Gamers can always tell an Irem game from the crowd due to their distinct sound and visual design, which range from adorable to Giger-esque biomechanical cyber nightmare. For this third compilation, the Irem Collection includes three arcade classics, plus a PC Engine home port of one of the titles. How do these nearly 40-year-old arcade games hold up?
Mr. Heli, or Battle Chopper as it’s sometimes known, is an 1987 arcade shooter plucked from Irem’s vault. Starring a yellow quirky, legged helicopter, players endure unreasonably tight passages while evading bullets and cartoony vehicles. The multidirectional scrolling and exploratory stages aim for ambition, with hidden paths and crystal mining for upgrades offering an impression of depth. Enemy patterns are relentless, and the hitbox feels like it’s painted with a broad brush, leading to maddening deaths in cramped corridors. Bosses, while visually striking, lean on predictable and unfair bullet spreads. They take too long to kill even with fully powered-up weapons.
Also included is the PC Engine port Mr. Heli’s Great Adventure, which has some stark differences from the arcade game. The balance has been tweaked to be slightly easier to compensate for the screen crunch, which zooms in on the field of view. While the effort to make it slightly fairer is appreciated, this was a false gesture as it’s not much of a help. It doesn’t matter which version of Mr. Heli/Battle Chopper is played; it is an unrelenting barrage of bullets and tanks coming at the protagonist in all directions. This is a legendarily hard shoot ’em up.
Mr. Heli/Battle Chopper resembles a rough Fantasy Zone-like game with a chunky-looking yellow helicopter. The sound, a repetitive chiptune dirge, grates more than it galvanises. Quality-of-life tweaks like rapid-fire and rewind, courtesy of the collection, help ease the pain, but they can’t salvage the core issue: the game feels like a relic that hasn’t aged with grace. Compared to the rest of the titles in this compilation, this is the weakest offering. A curiosity for arcade historians, but hardly a must-play.
From 1992 comes Mystic Riders, an anime-infused side-scrolling shooter that fares better than Mr. Heli. It’s a vibrant, if uneven, romp that commands more charm than precision. The gameplay leans on boomerang-style broom attacks, with charge shots and dodge-roll mechanics adding kinetic flair to the action. Power-ups, like elemental orbs and speed boosts, keep the pace brisk, though the system feels less polished than Irem’s R-Type. With fully-powered magic blasting on full-auto, the emulation’s frame rate falls to the single digits. The explosive action is just too much even for today’s emulation technology.
Stages brim with colourful, lush forests and stormy skies. The background art is impressively detailed and layered with parallax scrolling effects that imply depth and volume. The effect is marvelous and contrasts beautifully with the expressive anime wizards and dazzling pixelated explosions. Bosses are imposingly large and animated with complex limb-based movement, making them feel lively and threatening. Sonicly, Mystic Riders holds up with jaunty chiptunes that match the game’s whimsical tone, though sound effects border on shrill. Quality-of-life features like rapid-fire options, rewind, and display filters that smooth the arcade’s rough edges make it more approachable than its punishing coin-op roots.
Dragon Breed from 1989 is the best in the package and is the most heavy metal game Irem ever produced. It begins with one audacious guy who manhandles a newborn dragon and instantly takes it to the skies to wreak havoc against nightmarish abominations that resemble a mix of H.R. Giger and Jean Giraud Moebius. Through a post-apocalyptic gauntlet, Dragon Breed explodes with ingenuity that elevates it near the pinnacle of Irem’s storied catalogue.
Unlike most scrolling shoot ’em ups, Dragon Breed feels like the player assumed the role of a boss character. The dragon and its rider are massive and deal unbelievable damage to everything around them. Its tail curls around the vulnerable rider, shielding against enemy fire while unleashing lightning blasts, homing shots, or fiery bursts, depending on power-ups. The dragon’s fluid movement, coiling, extending, or anchoring for precise attacks, adds tactical depth that feels exhilaratingly fresh, even decades later. Stages teem with grotesque biomechanical fiends and crumbling ruins, each demanding deft positioning to survive dense bullet patterns. Bosses, like towering insectoid constructs, are spectacles of menace, their multi-phase attacks testing both reflexes and strategy.
Dragon Breed‘s art direction conjures a haunting, apocalyptic vision of gnarled organic enemies merged with metallic decay, rendered in vibrant hues that pop despite the era’s limits. The pulsing chiptune soundtrack, paired with meaty sound effects, drives the adrenaline without overstaying its welcome. Compared to the dull Mr. Heli or Mystic Riders’ whimsical co-op, Dragon Breed strikes a balance: less punishing than the former, more inventive than the latter. Mr. Heli’s clunky exploration feels pedestrian by contrast.
There aren’t a lot of power-ups, but each one is distinct from the last. Raining down lightning from beneath a long snake-like dragon is an inspired design choice, as is a constant stream of flame from its maw. At times it feels like a 2D reimagining of Panzer Dragoon. The occasionally cluttered visuals and a slightly repetitive mid-game keep it just shy of perfection. The dynamic dragon-riding mechanics and bold design cement it as a near-masterpiece.
Irem Collection Volume 3 is regretfully light on extras. Sadly, there is no art gallery or archival materials included. These games are so old that it’s possible that there was nothing left to showcase. The cheat features and rewind are almost mandatory for the outrageous difficulty for some of these (looking at you, Mr. Heli). The emulation is spotty for Mystic Riders, as it is prone to egregious slowdown when everything is exploding. Overall, this is a barebones collection with one of the leading titles being uninteresting compared to the rest. Dragon Breed is by far the absolute highlight.
