Ace Banana

Ace Banana is a fun VR game that is best played in short bursts. The motion tracking drift outside of the archery sections are hard to ignore, especially when this issue hasn’t cropped up in other VR games I’ve played using the same set-up, but the archery itself is accurate.

I felt there was very little content here to keep me coming back, other than the novel feeling of the bow and arrow, which is absolutely amazing in fact. Aside from this and maybe the visual style, I don’t see a huge reason I’d return to it, especially if other games adopt this bow and arrow feel. Yet at the same time, I can’t complain, it’s a simply game with colorful graphics and is appropriate for players of all ages. Just don’t expect it to kill hours of time.

It’s a shame Ace Banana can be so flustering, because there is a decent shooting gallery to unpeel here. [January 2016, p76]

It's a shame Ace Banana can be so flustering, because there is a decent shooting gallery to unpeel here. [Christmas 2016, p.86]

When bugs derail an experience so dramatically, it is extremely unfortunate.

Ace Banana is a tough game to recommend, and it’s even tougher to decide which control scheme you should use. If you care about the small menu mini-game, then you’ll need PlayStation Move controllers, but if you want to play the game with any reasonable success, you’ll want to play with the traditional controller. I didn’t have much fun with Ace Banana, as any enjoyment I did have was from mindlessly shooting monkeys early on in the game. The more I played, the more frustrated I became.

If you’re dying to have a shooting gallery type game for PSVR, there are better options. There are more fleshed-out titles, for equal or less cash, than Ace Banana.

A tech demo for the Move controllers disguised as a VR Game. [Issue#180, p.48]

Ace Banana isn’t a total trainwreck and might be a fun diversion for younger players for a while, but there’s a chance that even they will ultimately come away frustrated.

Simple shooting and VR can go together as for example Gunjack or Until Dawn proved. This, on the other hand, is underwhelming. Except for the well-executed archery mechanics, this lacks finesse and structure.

Ace Banana in its present state is barely playable with Move controllers.

I do think that there’s a game in there somewhere that might be worth the developers revisiting it when they’ve got a better understanding of VR. For now, though, the game is simply too limited, too clunky, too ugly, and too underdeveloped for its own good. Especially when Blast ‘em Bunnies does the same thing, only much better. The extra VR effect in Ace Banana just isn’t worth the trade-off in every other way.

Everything is just far too repetitive (not to mention tiring) to get folks through the campaign. A co-op mode didn’t even make it out in time for launch, which could have at least added some reason to keep playing. Ace Banana may be technically sound, but it’s plainly uninteresting when compared to the rest of PSVR’s launch lineup.

Ace Banana isn't a particularly fun game when it works, which makes all of the issues I ran into even more damning. There is room for a good archery game on PlayStation VR, but this isn't it. Its wave-based gameplay only serves to mask its lack of content, and even a charming aesthetic can't redeem this poorly designed game.

Ace Banana demonstrates that virtual reality experiences can be as creatively bankrupt and technically destitute as the most cynically conceived mobile games. It's an untended facsimile of wave-based survival that specializes in unreliable control, dubious assembly, and the induction of nausea.

Every part of this game is terrible...Ace Banana frustrated me like few games ever have, and it’s rare to see a finished title that gets every important design feature completely wrong. Ace Banana manages it, though, and sinks lower than almost any game I’ve ever played.