Raiden Legacy - Steam Edition Reviews

One of the finest and original arcade cabinet bullet hell games. Works well for me, no stuttering or lag. Doesn't include Raiden 2 though. Has local and online co-op. Extremely solid bullet hell shooter, good pixel art and bloody difficult.

Brutally difficult and another polite reminder of how useless I've become at gaming in my twilight years because I was actually quite good at Raiden on the Jaguar. The good news is that all four bundled games DO work on a Steam Deck and whilst emulation isn't the best, at least I do have the opportunity to revisit games that I genuinely love playing.....for a giveaway 6 quid. For that reason alone I'm happy to take them as they are (remembering that they weren't particularly well emulated back in the day of, erm, not paid for roms either) and just enjoy the moment. Leaderboards seem to be working and framerates do appear to be pretty stable (up to 4k/60fps when docked) and although they do appear to occasionally stutter, I'm kind of wondering if that's the partial left/right scrolling giving the impression of unstable framerates. It's hard to say either way so I'll stay on the fence with that one. Audio is broken though and the game resets your preferred resolution and local leaderboards each time you play. It's also pretty barebones but when you consider each game costs less than £2 that point can be largely forgiven. Oh, and there are no accessibility settings (is that really a bad thing?) and only 2 credits, so be prepared for some heavy duty practice if you want to see what each game has to offer in it's entirety. Recommended? Look, if you can slightly lower your standards in a similar way in which you would when playing City Connection's Dreamcast versions of coin-ops on their pretty woeful Zebra engine then there's not really a great deal wrong with Raiden Legacy...and based on price + content I'd give it a 7/10. On the other hand, if you want flawless emulation and/or the ability to tone down the brutal difficulty then this really isn't a bundle for you. At the end of the day though it is what it is and rather annoyingly I only have a yes/no recommend option for rating something that doesn't really fall into either category, so I'm just going to say "yes" with a bunch of buyer beware's and leave it at that.