Somehow, Ace Banana opens with the player confined to a hut and ordered to water and fertilize an anthropomorphic baby banana. The tools necessary to do this seem literally out of reach, but the attempt reveals a crucial piece of information; you are also a banana. While you actually can go through the motions and water an infant banana into a toddler banana, the game begins if you’re able to reach out and pull a nondescript rope positioned slightly above the gardening tools. Performing this action demanded I come dangerously close to reaching through my television but, after a dozen tries, I finally got the job done. I started Ace Banana.
Ace Banana appears to be a wave-based survival game. It takes place on a one (1) map with up to 16 waves of angry monkeys. The hook is that, rather than a traditional gun, you’re fending off dastardly monkeys with a makeshift bow and plunger arrows. If the monkeys reach any of your bases and loot all of your bananas, the game ends. Teleportation is granted by pointing the controller at other predetermined spots on the map and experiencing a weird delay before it takes you there. These new spaces either provide an angle to rain down plunger hell or thwart would-be banana thieves from a closer distance. Different classes of monkeys and the occasional towering boss sometimes roll in to hinder your banana protection profession.
As a concept, Ace Banana sounds like a fine, albeit shallow, introductory virtual reality experience. Archery, while omnipresent in other motion-controlled interfaces, is thus far unrepresented through Sony’s new hardware. Using two Move controllers to simulate a bow-and-arrow mechanic is a proven idea, and it’s sure to impress novices inside the early days of VR. All Ace Banana needed to do was remain structurally sound while creating noticeable contrast among its derivative pieces.
Instead, Ace Banana is a disaster. A technical and practical misfortune. This observation is instantly communicated by the lack of fidelity in your primary activity; shooting plungers. Using two Move controllers is hitchy and prone to sporadic bursts of grievous error. A DualShock 4, which drops the pulling-an-arrow mimicry in favor of simply aiming with the light bar, is debilitated by default aim being right-handed, and the apparent inability to switch perspectives. The PlayStation camera’s range, from whatever distance I was either sitting or standing at, failed to let me aim far enough to the right of my screen. It does not appear to be possible to play Ace Banana with a standard controller.
Let’s assume you fight through or adapt to Ace Banana’s technical snafus and start reliably cracking shots off. Most times a direct connection with a monkey will result in a naked monkey dying or an armored/clothed class of monkey taking damage. Sometimes nothing happens. If the primate is tagged while landing from a jump, your hit doesn’t count. One time, when the monkeys reached a tree they simply disappeared and then continued to steal my bananas anyway. I am aware that wave-based survival games tend to increase in difficulty through successive waves, but this seemed overly punitive for round two.
Boss fights are also a gas. During my first encounter with the gigantic Morankenstein, I had teleported up to the second-highest position while he (it?) started pillaging my lowest banana defense zone. Ace Banana refused to let me teleport back down there. I wasn’t close enough to get accurate shots off, enabling Morankenstein clear my stash out and issue a game over. My next attempt was a proper fight where Morankenstein deployed his tactics as intended. This involved throwing a monkey at me, which, if I didn’t shoot it out of the sky, temporarily covered my screen. Sometimes he would pound me in the dirt and render my arms motionless.
Morankenstein also has a blue circular laser that, as best as I can tell, jitters the screen and induces nausea. I have a pretty strong stomach (or eyes? Inner ears? Whatever makes people sick) when it dealing with virtual reality. I’ve done weird motion actions in a Vive, performed high speed crashes and insane donuts in Driveclub VR, repeatedly power-slid a tank in Battlezone VR, and travelled at the speed of sound in Rez Infinite and Thumper. A boss encounter in Ace Banana made me feel sick, up the point where I didn’t trust myself to drive a car hours later. I have no idea if this was an intentional attack from a grossly misconducted boss encounter or a spotlight on Ace Banana’s careless organization, but it was not a pleasant way to endure a Thursday afternoon.
A suspicion of negligence bleeds through every fabric of Ace Banana. Most people with an operating familiarity of the English language will be able to sense a poor localization. Ace Banana tests this thesis by frequently confusing an article’s relationship with a noun and deploying other unnatural turns of phrase. The dialogue, when it’s not struggling to space itself properly or remain confined to its text bubble, occasionally doesn’t match the voice over. Demanding a coherent narrative from a bow-and-arrow simulator is silly, but Ace Banana’s pitiful localization is outclassed by most thirty-year-old Nintendo Entertainment System games.
Ace Banana also doesn’t feel like it was completely finished before it was stocked for sale. When monkeys arrive by rollercoaster into your base, they’re frozen in a static animation that looks like someone used a mouse to drag them across the screen and deploy them near your banana stash. Along the same lines, acquiring power-ups involves said power-up advancing toward your face and becoming frighteningly large until it enters your head and disappears. Ace Banana is missing several levels of refinement from what I hope to assume was the original plan.
Power-ups, earned bonuses intended to provide you with an advantage, are also dubious. Sometimes when you take down a monkey, a brightly colored object with an aura will appear. These are modifiers intended to enhance your attacks. One time I got a rock tied to my plunger that wiped out distance shots and sunk to the ground instantly. Another time I got a triple arrow shot that proceeded to shoot around anything I fired it at. For reasons I can’t explain, at one point my plunger turned into a fish and appeared to not damage monkeys. There is a reasonable possibility that these, like the monkey that flies in your face and sticks to your field of view, were intended to be a hilarious disadvantage, but most are neither fun to see nor overcome. Annoying the player is not a viable gameplay mechanic.
Imagine Ace Banana being your first time in virtual reality. Picture finally affording the hardware to transpose yourself to another world and, somehow, Ace Banana is your first encounter. Visualize the crushing disappointment of controls that do not function properly, the realization that you are playing an untended facsimile of a vacant design plan, and the nausea implicit in a game that cannot permeate basic hardware qualifications despite no observable risk in its fabrication.
Pretend you’re the victim of the cynical mob of indifference that sold Ace Banana and see why some fear that virtual reality may be undone by careless artifacts of the mobile market.
