The Toaplan Arcade 1 cartridge was an excellent collection, especially for shoot ’em up fans – can another trip to the Toaplan archive reap similarly exciting rewards?

Unfortunately not; it’s a weird choice by Blaze to release these two collections side by side, because it definitely feels like the law of diminishing returns applies here.

It’s not that anything on here is particularly bad, as such – the issue is that, after the first collection was so shmup heavy, you’d perhaps expect the second one to be less so, but that’s not the case.

Of the 7 titles included here, three are vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups and one is a horizontally scrolling shmup.

Even the top down racing game, Rally Bike, has the look and feel of a vertically scrolling shooter – even though it isn’t one!

Bizarrely, the same applies to run and gun title Demon’s World, which – unusually for a 2D platform-based game – has forced scrolling.

Which leaves lone hero, Wardner, as the only game to truly break away from shmup-style conventions.

It’s a superb, Wonder Boy meets Ghouls and Ghosts-style fantasy platformer with some great level design and lovely visuals.

The same goes for pretty much every game here, with each being technically sound and having aged beautifully.

The vertically scrolling shoot ’em ups – Fire Shark, Twin Cobra and Twin Hawk – all look and play great, but they’re very similar aesthetically; there was a lot more variety amongst the shmups on the first cartridge.

Even the space-set sideways scroller, Hellfire, feels like a lesser Zero Wing, the excellent game you’ll already have if you bought the first Toaplan cartridge.

If you have an Evercade EXP, you can make use of TATE mode for all of the vertically scrolling games – Rally Bike included – so that may be of interest to you.

Otherwise, it just feels like we’ve got more than enough shmups already; though Toaplan are of course known primarily for their incredible shoot ’em ups, I’d have liked to see more of their platformers or other game types get their time in the spotlight with the second collection.

Shmup fans will be in heaven, but the rest of us probably can’t justify the cost of this collection just for Wardner, as good as it is.

You can purchase the Toaplan Arcade 2 cartridge from Amazon here.