Recent reviews by PolyHertz

It's similar to Twisted Metal or Rogue Trip, with some nice vehicle designs, and I have to give props to the developers though for letting players turn off bloom and blur. However with no characters, no story, uninteresting weapons, poor physics, and race-tracks for levels despite there being no point in racing at all (only kill count matters), I just don't see any reason to play this over the classics.

Solid concept, somewhat addictive gameplay, but it's basically a minigame and you'll have seen everything the game has to offer within 15 minutes.

The game consists of an arcade mode and missions. All the levels and missions use the same three backgrounds and small handful of enemies/hazards, but with the arcade levels having a bit of randomization to their layouts. Your ships hitbox is slightly wider then your ship, resulting in often taking damage from things you probably shouldn't have. Destructible terrain a neat but a bit glitchy; when you destroy a part of it the remaining pieces will often shift their position, sometimes causing you to crash into them. In arcade mode at the end of each level you'll be forced to choose a perk, which will upgrade one aspect of your ship while also downgrading another, so it's a pick your poison type scenario.

I think this is a game I'll be returning to occasionally, but it really needed more content and numerous smaller issues do add up. Given the asking price I wouldn't recommend it, but if it drops to $1-2 or you see it in a comparatively cheap bundle it may be worth checking out.

My very first impressions were good thanks to the solid audio, nice background art, and the fact it actually worked with my DS5 controller without needing to change any Steam settings (that's rare!). The bullets also felt like they had some solid impact when hitting enemies (good use of rumble). Unfortunately though I quickly realized that this was not a traditional shmup where how far you got was up to your skill, but instead is one based endurance where you play a linear series of scrolling levels repeatedly until you have enough upgrades to power through all the developers bad design decisions.

Ship controls are slippery and imprecise; After you let go of a direction the ship continues moving in said direction for about half a second, and no the mouse cannot be used to control your ship as a way to overcome this. On top of that your ships hit box is huge, with the 'glow' of bullets often seemingly hitting the ship before the bullet itself even touches it. Attacks and objects that can hit the ship often come from behind where you (normally) can't shoot, and if you're too far to the left they'll hit before you even see them coming. Of course being a rogue like you die once and you have to start the entire run again, no continues.

Despite an overall solid presentation and audio work there are too many poor design decisions which hurt the overall experience to recommend it.

Nice graphics and art, but the races are 99% luck and 1% skill.

All cars are supposed to be visible on screen at the same time and are automatically pushed forward or re-spawned further along the track if they fall too far behind, and there's massive amounts of rubber banding beyond that as well. As a result what place you get in the races is more down to luck then anything else, which to me made the races feel completely pointless.

A very generic 3D brawler that doesn't try too hard at anything. Gameplay, environments, music, story/writing...none of it was very good. After playing for maybe half an hour I found myself fully and completely bored.

I've played many pong clones, and this is not one of the better ones.

Ball physics and collision boxes are messy. The single player mode, which is just a short arcade mode, introduces win/loss mechanics without explaining them (I have no clue why the game decided I won/lost certain matches). The pixel art is nice at a glance, but a lot of it ends up being improperly scaled (especially text) resulting in blurry or misaligned graphics.

There's more to this game then I've seen, but I've seen enough to not care anymore.

It's a one level score attack game with Atari 2600 controls and a Gameboy art style. There's only one (repetitive) music track by default, and three you can buy in game. There's a story scene about the villain kidnapping villagers by putting them in bubbles, but you don't rescue them or ever see any characters in bubbles ever again after that (being able to rescue/collect villagers would have made the game way more interesting).

Art wise I think they did a great job overall (especially with the concept / promotional art), but the game itself just doesn't live up to its potential.

It's...OK? Technically it has nearly everything a Kart racer should have, but it's just lacking something to make it feel worthwhile and fun. If drift boosting gave you more speed, or the AI cheated a bit less, or the courses weren't so restrictive, or the characters were more endearing ... maybe then I could recommend it. But as-is the 'Mixed' review on Steam suits it perfectly.

The 'climbing' genre of games have found popularity in rent years with games like "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy", "Only Up", or the more recent "PEAK". Banana Hell is similar in that's it's about climbing, however unlike those games this one has no real physics or interesting gameplay concepts, instead simply filling the path upward with flying enemies that knock the play off their platform when touched. This makes for a much less interesting and much more frustrating experience. Nothing about the music, level design, or dialog are particularly memorable either.

Save your money, this one's not worth it.

Controller support is completely broken on modern controllers like DS5 (I tried everything, was only able to get controller support working via dusting off an old DS4). The cars have very little traction and slide/spin very easily as one would expect from 1920's race cars, however the real issue with this is that you have no ability to change stick sensitivity and barely touching it turns your front tires all the way. There's also no analog trigger support for gas, so you're either flooring it or letting off entirely (I tried changing it and it refused to work with analog triggers).

I was hoping for something relatively accurate to how race cars handled back then, but the poorly implemented analog support basically ruins what could have been a neat throwback.