Some of the most exciting games in the arcades of my youth were lightgun titles, particularly as they were always in dedicated, bespoke cabinets with their own, custom gun attachments. They practically begged you to play them, with their incredible looking hardware; and that’s without even mentioning how good the games looked and felt to play back then.

Taito were masters of the genre, with their 1987 title Operation Wolf being a stone cold classic that was impossible to ignore on any trip to an arcade.

With its Uzi lightgun and frantic, side-scrolling, Rambo-esque gameplay, it was an absolute revelation in its day.

Its direct sequel, Operation Thunderbolt, added a second Uzi to its own cabinet, allowing two players to take on the bad guys in more military combat action.

It also switched its gameplay style from side-scrolling to into-the-screen, with sprite-scaling that still looks great to this day.

Space Gun followed in 1990, and combined both side-scrolling and into-the-screen action; it also added branching paths, and the ability to backtrack using a pedal.

Its sci-fi setting cribbed an awful lot from Alien/Aliens, and its arcade cabinet even had a gorgeous, Giger-esque bio-mechanical design.

Go back a year to ’89 and the release of Night Striker; though not a lightgun shooter, it’s a cyberpunk-esque, into-the-screen shoot ’em up (not unlike games such as Space Harrier or After Burner), full of frantic, fast-paced sprite-scaling and branching paths to give it a high level of replayability.

What do all these games have in common? You’ve probably guessed that yes, they’re all part of new Nintendo Switch collection, Operation Night Strikers.

It’s a gloriously nostalgic collection, with some excellent concessions to the fact that you won’t be able to play the three lightgun shooters with an actual lightgun. You can use calibrate your Joy-Cons to use as pseudo-lightguns, for example, and despite the calibration being very easily knocked out of whack, you can also recentre your aim on the fly with a single button press.

Of course you can also use a cursor and control these with the Joy-Con sticks, or even (if you happen to have a Nintendo Switch 2) use mouse control in a similar way.

All four games are excellent, if short, arcade experiences. It’s also the case that they feel really cheap in terms of their often unfair difficulty; naturally, this was a deliberate design choice to ensure players kept pumping more coins into the machine to continue playing, but here you can enter as many credits as you want without any issue.

Different visual filters and on-screen information can be applied, with as much or as little detail as you desire able to be toggled on or off.

Despite the four games being great examples of classic arcade titles, there’s no extras here, such as flyers, design notes or other documentation, not even much in the way of information at all, on each game. So it feels pretty barebones in terms of what’s included (though multiple versions of each arcade title, from different regions and with different difficulty levels, are included).

Adding to that is the fact that home ports of the four games, with multiple versions in some cases, have been produced, but aren’t included. You can see the Master System port of Space Gun above, and the version of Operation Wolf for the same console below, for example. Instead, these are locked in a rather costly DLC pack, which is not far off the price of the base game. Given how stingy the overall package feels in general, this only exacerbates the situation.

That said, I’ve had a great deal of fun with Operation Night Strikers, and it’s been a joy to revisit the original arcade versions of these games (or, in the case of Night Striker, play it for the first time!). I was absolutely obsessed with all three of the lightgun games in this collection back in the day, so it’s fantastic to play the ‘true’ versions of each of them once more.

Of course, as good and as thoughtful as the control methods are, it’s not quite a substitute for using lightguns themselves, but this is as close to the real deal as it’s been possible to get for some time, and the emulation is flawless. Save states for each game definitely help to sweeten the deal too (especially when Space Gun, for example, has a ‘bad’ ending!).

Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a code for Operation Night Strikers for review purposes. Operation Night Strikers is now available for Nintendo Switch, and is compatible with Nintendo Switch 2.

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