PlayStation 4 Critic Reviews

Another gripe I have with the game is that there are no checkpoints. If you fail, you have to start from Wave 1. While getting through each wave doesn’t take an extraordinary amount of time, your arms do start to hurt after shooting a lot of arrows. It would have been nice if the game implemented some sort of checkpoint system as I frequently found myself dying during the boss battles.

Ace Banana is a fun VR game that is best played in short bursts. The motion tracking drift outside of the archery sections are hard to ignore, especially when this issue hasn’t cropped up in other VR games I’ve played using the same set-up, but the archery itself is accurate.

I felt there was very little content here to keep me coming back, other than the novel feeling of the bow and arrow, which is absolutely amazing in fact. Aside from this and maybe the visual style, I don’t see a huge reason I’d return to it, especially if other games adopt this bow and arrow feel. Yet at the same time, I can’t complain, it’s a simply game with colorful graphics and is appropriate for players of all ages. Just don’t expect it to kill hours of time.

When bugs derail an experience so dramatically, it is extremely unfortunate.

It's a shame Ace Banana can be so flustering, because there is a decent shooting gallery to unpeel here. [Christmas 2016, p.86]

It’s a shame Ace Banana can be so flustering, because there is a decent shooting gallery to unpeel here. [January 2016, p76]

Ace Banana isn’t a total trainwreck and might be a fun diversion for younger players for a while, but there’s a chance that even they will ultimately come away frustrated.

A tech demo for the Move controllers disguised as a VR Game. [Issue#180, p.48]

If you’re dying to have a shooting gallery type game for PSVR, there are better options. There are more fleshed-out titles, for equal or less cash, than Ace Banana.

Ace Banana is a tough game to recommend, and it’s even tougher to decide which control scheme you should use. If you care about the small menu mini-game, then you’ll need PlayStation Move controllers, but if you want to play the game with any reasonable success, you’ll want to play with the traditional controller. I didn’t have much fun with Ace Banana, as any enjoyment I did have was from mindlessly shooting monkeys early on in the game. The more I played, the more frustrated I became.