Bangai-'Doh' HD: Missile Fury Review

**KillerOfCereal** · May 14th, 2011

I am certain that I unleashed my fury playing Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury. If there is anything that I learned from the Japanese title is that it’s the most frustrating game anyone will probably play. Not many good things can be said about Bangai-O and it’s something I will remember as “The game that almost made me cry in anger”.

Looking at the Main Menu screen after “Pressing Start” I was determined to beat every level they could throw at me because of the generic Windows 97 Space background and a cheesy adventure song that sounds like it came out of an 90’s movie. One thing caught my eye in the menu before hitting the single player almost immediately. It was a mode called “Edit Mode” that seemed really sweet and was excited to use when I was done with the Single Player. Once I was in Single Player I began my baby steps into a stairwell of cursing and tight grips on my controller. Beginning with the Tutorial seemed like a good start for me because I really didn’t know what to expect when playing and what I needed to do. My instructor, Dr. Ban, was very helpful in getting me used to the controls. He taught me that tilting LS was to move and tilting RS was to shoot, holding RB allowed me to hover, pressing A toggled the auto-shot feature where I didn’t have to tilt RS, when tilting LS and pressing RT I could dash through enemies and become invincible doing so, just pressing RT would freeze any enemy and missile close by, and holding and releasing LT would unleash a Counter attack destroying almost everything nearby. After reviewing his tips for a good 5 minutes and being annoyed because of the constant cheering going off in the background I was ready to play!
Thus began my run-through of Fury Mode! Now Dr. Ban, my instructor, became my navigator. He told me that there were a lot of enemies in the first map, try to shoot as many omni-directional Counter Attacks I could and to destroy spawners or the enemies will keep spawning. With my confusion on what exactly I was supposed to do I began the mission. The first thing I did was fly up and scream because of all the missiles that were flying at my mech. Even more confused than I was before I used my Counter Attack and flew around using auto-shot on anything I saw that would be bad for my life expectancy. After spending 2 minutes and 50 seconds blowing up missiles I noticed an annoying sound that became faster and annoying, that’s when I noticed there was a time limit of 3 minutes. Thank you for the heads up Dr. Ban! My second run was more successful than the last because I figured out what I had to do. I had to destroy these blue squares, the spawners, and destroy people’s homes, that I thought I had to defend. Something about destroying people’s homes made me sad because you would hear people screaming upon destruction. I believe every mission after that destroyed my love for twin stick shooters. With each passing level Dr. Ban gave out more useless tips (two of them being “Don’t miss the item that will appear” & “You can’t use Dash. Good Luck!”) & bumps began forming in my neck. Some of the missions didn’t even make sense at all (like they did anyways) & involved me shooting ants in space or shooting people’s homes that were upside down (in space for some reason). After dying 3 times in a row on one level Dr. Ban will allow you to continue to the next one. I’ve only completed 11 out of the 100 missions successfully and I don’t intend actually completing them. I tried and always made it around the end with no health (which reminds me that you collect fruit from destroyed enemies for health) just to get screwed over by over powered enemies that would literally spawn inside of you. Who knew that destroying things and collecting lemons while being shot by robots, bitten by ants, bitten by even bigger ants, get stabbed by a huge robot with a katana could be so frustrating? I had my fill of Fury Mode and I was ready to move on to edit mode.

I was lost in Edit Mode and still am. The controls are extremely confusing and getting one robot down was the hardest task to do. I find it funny that right after I placed a robot down, I forgot how to do it. I love the concept of Edit Mode because it reminds me of N+’s Level Editor/Creator, which was pretty fun to show off to friends. This reminds me that you can’t download any maps online unless somebody on your friends list created one.

I wish I could recommend Bangai-O HD to people, I really do. But that’s not going to happen because of everything that causes stress while playing. You can never find a multiplayer match even if you spend 5 minutes searching, your veins will burst if you try to get pass level 12, and you’ll lose all your respect to Japanese game developers/creators. The only thing I found great was that you could get 75% of the achievements the first 10 minutes of the game and replaying the first level to pull of awesome combos.