Bangai-O Spirits - first look

You’ve also got a super weapon that destroys incoming projectiles in all directions, and fires missiles out to deal with enemies all around. The longer you hold down the button, along with the closer and more numerous the enemy projectiles get to you, the more missiles you’ll fire out, so you have to judge how safe you’ll be. This mechanic mirrors the game’s general design of instilling constant tension with the fear of dying at any second, and the choices of risk vs reward. Good use of the super weapon is a key component of Bangai-O gameplay.

The levels are laid out in mostly narrow, winding corridors, which are absolutely choked with enemies. You can use the twisting corridors to escape around corners when the action gets too hot. Along the way you’ll pick up space fruit to increase your score (don’t ask why a mech is eating fruit). In old-school shooter tradition, Bangai-O is as much about score as survival, and the space fruit plays a big role. The fruit appears when you destroy an enemy, but the more explosions that are on screen when the fruit appears determines what kind of fruit it is, and how valuable to your score it is. Since your super weapon releases a barrage of missiles in all directions, it’s the best way to earn the juiciest fruit.

The original Bangai-O was a blast to play, and Spirits is looking to shape up the same way. Still, we have two concerns with Spirits. One is that with everything so small and crammed into the DS screen it may end up becoming too hard to discern what’s going on. Luckily the graphics are quite simple and aren’t overly cluttered with effects, despite the number of things flying around and exploding, so it might not be too much of a problem. The other is the lack of an analog stick – the Dreamcast original used the stick for shooting in directions independently of the d-pad piloting. The DS, of course has no analog stick. If the devs can incorporate stylus aiming into it, the game will be golden.

To ensure you get a ton of bang for your buck, Spirits is aiming to include around 150 levels to punish your brain. On top of that, there’s 4-player co-op and competitive play, and you can even design your own levels and share them with friends via modem-like technology – the DS speakers transmit that familiar modem screech and another DS’ microphone “listens” to it, reconstructing the level from the audio code.

Make no mistake - Bangai-O Spirits is for the seriously hardcore shooter fanatics, and will quickly punish the casual player unprepared for gradual progress through countless deaths.

Feb 28, 2008