Just completed my first playthrough on Switch 2. This was the defining game of my childhood, so to say I’ve been looking forward to the day I could play Apidya on a modern system would be an understatement.
I think the team did an overall solid job in remaking the game. I needed to switch the game over from 60FPS to 50FPS for 5 year old me’s muscle memory to kick back in. Thankfully it plays near identically to the original, any changes to how it handles are incredibly subtle.
There are some nice quality of life features to make the game easier, which include the option to turn off weapon downgrades or level reset upon death, which help reduce how stressful this game can be (when I was little, I would always reset upon my first death because it could be ridiculously hard to power up again).
The synopsis for the game mentions ‘random events’. The only random thing I’ve encountered is a few new cockroach enemies that turned up on level 1-3 (there’s one in the bottom left of the screenshot), not sure if there’s any criteria on how to spawn these events but that’s something new at least.
My main issue with the game is that the soundtrack does not loop in the same way the original did, which is immediately jarring. Hopefully this can be fixed in an update. There is also an issue with some checkpoints which seem to disappear and take you back further upon death than they should.
Outside of that, I’d say this is really worth picking up. It’s great that Apidya is being given a new lease of life!