[quote]Follow our Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/] Summit Reviews [/url], to see more high quality reviews regularly.[/quote]
Bananaguy is a traditional 2D platformer / collectathon in which you travel through six small, open-ended areas and collect banana coins to progress. It took me about 2 hours 30 minutes to 100% a save file (there’s a bit of additional post-game content), but if you’re not going out of your way to explore and collect everything, I’d say 1 hour 30 minutes is more realistic.
Right out the gate, the game is a bit bland in terms of presentation. Simple pixel graphics, simple music, simple sound effects; nothing really stands out. While the major levels each have their own theme (a jungle level, a sky level, a crystal cave level, a desert level, etc.), it’s hard to pinpoint a unique overarching “aesthetic”, besides the simplicity of it all.
The story and writing are intentionally bad, consisting mostly of weird, humourous dialogue of the “lol, so random! XD” variety. It didn’t do much for me, but it’s also not detrimental, given how platformers are usually a “gameplay first” experience.
So how is the gameplay? It’s simple, which is both good and bad. You have your standard jump and wall jump, you can press “down” in the air to fastfall, and if you jump from a crouch, it will go a bit higher. The core mechanic you’ll be using the most is the dive, which makes Bananaguy shed his peel and launch himself from mid-air. It gives you a bit of extra height, but mostly propels you horizontally and helps change your jump’s direction. In the unpeeled state, you bounce off from walls, so you’re helpless until you land. Lastly, Bananaguy automatically kicks small items he touches, which is used for some puzzles and minigames.
There are a few nuances to these mechanics (if you dive and jump again right as you’re about to touch the ground, you’ll be launched forward - a very useful trick that is never explained), but otherwise, this is all you get. You don’t unlock any other abilities - no double jump, no slide, no attacks of any sort (which makes sense: there are no enemies). It’s a pure and simple platformer which hands you your whole toolkit at the get-go. This can be a positive, since having things stay consistent makes movement easy to learn and master. It can also be a negative, as it makes traversing many areas feel quite same-y and monotonous.
Gameplay variety is instead achieved with minigames and level-specific mechanics: monkey bars in Clubs town, gates and keys in the Diamonds cave, platforms with time limits in the Hearts sky area, and other such. The issue is that some of these gimmicks are extremely under-utilised (there’s one room with lowered gravity which is the ONLY place that uses this mechanic) and in the end, they’re never combined together into a serious challenge, even in the post-game content. A final test of your skill which uses monkey bars, moving platforms, time limits and projectiles would feel like an appropriate climax for the game, but it never happens.
One final pet peeve: the game resets your settings every time you boot it up, and controller vibration is enabled by default. I don’t get this - the controller vibrates every time you land on the ground, so it’ll be buzzing in your hands almost constantly. It quickly gets annoying.
So, why is it that despite all this, I’m recommending Bananguy? Well, a lot of my gripes are mitigated by how short the game is - you don’t really have time to get bored with the mechanics when you’re only playing with them for 2 hours. It’s also not a big commitment: you can crack it open for a bit of fun and be finished with it in an afternoon. It only costs 4 euro, which I think is a very fair price for what you’re getting.
And on top of that, it’s clear that this is an earnest effort from a small dev who just likes platformers. I feel it would be cruel to judge it for not being as polished and tightly designed as the work of big studios or mid-budget indie teams. For what it is, it’s a perfectly satisfactory little game.
