With dozens of PSVR games available at launch it can be difficult to determine what’s worth your time and money. Thankfully, PlayStation has some pretty good demos for many of their games and then you have reviews like this one to steer you clear of epic fails like Ace Banana. On paper, this would seem like the perfect game for VR; especially since it is an archery title using the Move controllers and there have already been a few archery games on the PS3 using the same style of input. Archery games also have various proven levels of success and failure on the PC using HTV Vive.
Ace Banana takes the concept of archery and buries it within a charming and colorful world where monkeys have gone “evil” and are trying to kidnap all the bananas. As the chosen defender of all things banana, you will use your trusty bow to defend countless waves of incoming primates. Much of the charm lies in the unique variety of monkeys, their specific art, animation, and perhaps something that could be mistaken for tactics. But despite their mix of skills and wardrobe styles, Ace Banana is mostly about your ability to accurate target and fire a bow as fast as possible, rather than any underlying attempts at strategy.
While motion sickness won’t be a problem seeing as how you are pretty much a stationary turret, the level of arm fatigue is surprisingly real and will wash over you after about 15-20 minutes of repetitively miming archery moves. Thankfully, the game doesn’t require full draws on the bow, and you can even cheat the mechanics by doing faster short pulls effectively increasing your rate of fire. And with 16 levels things start to get painfully repetitive, both in gameplay and bodily stress, and the only original thing to look forward to is the intermittent boss fight.
It would have been cool to have some sort of co-op mode where those looking at the screen could shout out locations of monkeys invisible to the VR player. The description in the PlayStation Store does indicate that a 4-player co-op mode is “coming soon”. but I have no idea how that will work with VR or if you’ll need four pairs of Move controllers to make it work even in a non-VR mode.
Ironically, the game appears to be designed for the pre-teen age group that is being discouraged from using the PSVR. Sadly, it is those kids that would probably enjoy the amusing art, animation, and physical gameplay the most. It’s also those same kids who would likely not notice the surprising number of grammatical/spelling mistakes in the script.
Ace Banana isn’t the worst game in the PSVR launch line-up, but it is near the bottom. The designers managed to make the most of the last-gen Move technology creating an engaging archery arcade game, but sadly for anyone over 12 that game is going to be too easy, too short, too repetitive, or all of the above. Thankfully, the publisher seems to recognize that with its $15 price ($12 at the time of this review), so it might not be the worst thing you can try if you are desperate to shoot some monkeys, otherwise just go to the store and buy $15 worth of bananas.
