International Space Banana is essentially a ripoff of a game called "Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy". If you never heard of it (me neither), Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy is one of those joke games that went slightly viral but otherwise lacks deep interest as far as video games go in the 21st century. Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (and by extension, this game, which is a ripoff of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy) is a simple physics/movement puzzle game where you must navigate a 2D level to get to the exit. The trick is, movement is made incredibly awkward. In the case of International Space Banana, you're a spinning banana, and you can spin clockwise or counterclockwise. Depending on your spin, when you strike something you will bounce off in a particular direction with a particular velocity. Bounce around various obstacles.
There's a bit of rather mediocre humour associated with the game, at best this may on occasion cause you to exhale slightly more sharply through your nose. Truly the caviar of video game humour right here. But you can get all of that watching a playthrough on Youtube, so we can probably discard that. That leaves a really bland, awkward and slightly frustrating game experience (I am sure I am not the only gamer here that doesn't actually like being frustrated). I think there's enough of a game here that we can't brand it as insincere "jokeware", however.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The game features lazy low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s. It's unclear why the developers weren't able to arrange high quality, high polygon count contemporary assets for the game, and also irrelevant... what matters is that this looks bad as a result of their decisions, a compromise PC gamers shouldn't have to put up with.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
This looks and feels like a mobile app, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the app stores. It's unclear why this was put on Steam instead of the app stores it seems to have been designed for. Maybe it was removed, maybe it was rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all).
Regardless, for all intents and purposes International Space Banana might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones and play games that might as well be mobile apps.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The game never really caught on with the millions of gamers on Steam, with a very low peak player count close to launch, and then just a handful of players launching this game every couple of days. This is undoubtedly caused by factors such as those raised in this review. It's always helpful with buying decisions to consider how popular and successful the product is, and unfortunately while this did accumulate a few participation trophy reviews, overall, people just aren't using it.
International Space Banana is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is difficult to recommend. $1 isn't much, but this is also competing with over 9,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option on Steam. As I always say, if you can live with the defects I've listed, then go right ahead and buy the game.
