Apidya' Special (Switch 2) review: this weird '90s Amiga shooter gets the remaster it deserves

Few games remain ingrained in the memory, but the ones that do tend to have some strange hook that refuses to disappear, and for me, Apidya' has always been one of those games because, even after all these years, I can still picture that robotic wasp flying through the undergrowth, shooting insects, fish and all manner of wiggly things crawling out of a decaying rat carcass.

It's an image that stuck, partly because the Amiga was very good at producing this sort of thing in the early '90s (read our retro game console guide), when a developer could take a familiar shoot-'em-up template and dress it up in imaginative new ways, and partly because Apidya' really is quite odd when you step back and look at it. Underneath all that insect life, though, this is a straightforward Gradius-inspired shooter, with waves of enemies coming at you, power-up options running along the bottom of the screen and a steadily expanding arsenal of power shots, split lasers, drones and more being tapped into when you need them.

That basic design still works, and playing Apidya' Special on Switch 2 (it's releasing on Switch), I found myself enjoying the shooting more than I expected, because the remaster offers several ways to take the edge off without ruining the feel. You can extend your lives, continue from where you died and, most usefully, choose to keep your power-ups after losing a life, which means you don't get that familiar old-school shooter experience of making one stupid mistake and then having to fight your way back from practically nothing.

Apidya' Special is pure '90s weirdness

Those new play options make a big impact, because Apidya' still has plenty of those cruel 1990s game design ideas designed to catch you out, including a sewer pipe stage that flips the screen and your controls. It's a weird design decision that feels completely of its time, likely because the Amiga could flip and push pixels around, so the original developer, Kaiko, did it without really thinking about whether it should; ultimately, it adds to what made Apidya memorable in the first place.

The remaster even adds in some new ideas, such as Night Mode and randomised new enemy waves – there's new co-op too – all adding to the sense that this is a release that understands the original's personality.

The pixel art is a big part of that sense of identity, and Apidya' Special gets the remastering job right because it doesn’t overcook the new designs; in fact, it's remade them from the original 1992 Amiga assets and built on a proprietary engine, not Unity or Unreal, including unreleased assets intended for a cancelled 1990s console port. Those original Amiga graphics still hold up, while the updated pixel art gives everything more definition and clarity; the insect designs remain strange, the environments retain that grubby organic quality, and, importantly, the new pixel art, if you flip to modern visuals, doesn't bury the original ideas under layers of effects and unnecessary detail. You can tweak things with CRT shaders, bloom, and authentic scanline simulation too, so there's plenty for retro game fans.

That remaster restraint shows as the game moves away from its early nature-themed stages of grass and rivers and introduces more mechanical designs that feel lifted from R-Type, because retro remasters often keep adding detail until the original's clarity vanishes. Apidya' Special avoids that, keeping the sprites readable and letting the designs do the work, which is especially welcome in the later stages when things become increasingly busy.

But for all the personality in the art and setting, the actual structure of Apidya' rarely strays too far from Konami's Gradius template. You learn enemy patterns, choose when to take a power-up, try to keep your weapon setup intact for the big moments, and while Apidya' throws in enough strange micro-world insect-y ideas to keep things interesting, it never really feels as though it's trying to reinvent the genre.

That isn't necessarily a criticism, because the shooting remains solid and there's a pleasant rhythm to working through the stages, but it does mean the game lives or dies on how much you enjoy that old-school formula, and for me the answer is still mostly yes. The controls feel good, the pace works, and there's enough variation in the weapon system to make the power-ups feel tactical.

Boss encounters are equally nicely pitched, and feel more creative and weird than the usual shooters of the era – whether it’s the massive pike, laser-firing oyster or maggot-infested dead rat, they are odd, even if how you battle them is fairly rudimentary – sit screen-left and shoot. Don’t expect any complex memory tests or staged surprises; what you see is what you get.

That '90s pacing and skill test can mean bosses and some in-stage surprises lead to wild difficulty spikes, where out of the blue the game’s wave design and screen-flipping punish you abruptly. This is where Apidya' Special reveals its age, and it can be disarming to play games from the 90s like this, because they really didn’t hold back. It’s also a reason why the game is fairly short – just five stages that loop (with secret stages too) – because the imbalance means there’s hell to pay, and stages and bosses can be hard going (but you do have the game options to make life easier).

Still, I think that's why this remaster works, because Apidya' Special doesn't need to convince me that Apidya was secretly one of the great lost shooters of the Amiga era. It wasn't – hello SWIV, Disposable Hero, Battle Squadron, Silkworm, Turrican 2 – and pretending otherwise would probably miss the point. It's a very good ‘90s shoot-'em-up, heavily indebted to Konami, with some solid mechanics and a handful of ideas that haven't aged quite as well, but wrapped around all of that is this wonderfully peculiar world that still feels unlike anything else.

There are plenty of technically better shooters from this period, plenty with more demanding bosses and deeper systems, but I don't remember those games in such the same way as the Gradius-clone where you controlled a wasp and battled a praying mantis. Apidya' has always had that going for it, and Apidya' Special understands that its best move is to preserve the weirdness and not mess with the formula – the appeal was always in that bizarre combination of familiar Konami shooting and insect-infested design, and after spending time with it again, I'm glad it's not been tidied up too much.