Stop monkeying about and save your banana horde in VR…
Ace Banana is an archery style game where you shoot waves of monkeys who are trying to steal all your bananas. You use the Move controllers to aim and draw back your bow, which is fine in short bursts…but damn it makes your arms hurt after a while, I honestly don’t know how archers do it professionally.
The game lacks any sort of checkpoint system, so if you die you have to start from Wave 1. This is frustrating because of the physical restraints of firing arrows repeatedly. The game itself does look neat in VR though, making it one of the more colourful looking bunch of the launch line-up. The issue as well comes down to the motion controls, I found I had to keep recalibrating and launching arrows at long-distance did become a real issue for some reason.
The feeling of firing arrows is brilliant though, but the amount of content is limited. It’s a nice example of how I hope other PSVR games could use a bow and arrow, it just needs fine-tuning and more than just the typical shooting gallery that some VR games are guilty of. Not that I have anything against that type of game, It’d just be nice if it offered something else as well.
The Verdict
Ace Banana is a limited, but fun archery game. It’s best played in small doses so you don’t pull a muscle in your arms, which I can see some gamers doing. Hopefully a patch will improve the motion controls, but that aside it’s a nice glimpse at what future archery games could be like.