Banshee (Amiga)

 It's a shooting game, and it's on the Amiga, so I'm sure many of you can predict that this won't be a positive review. I do have some nice things to say about Banshee, though, so look forward to that, at least. I'll start the slating here by stating that this game was only released on the 32-bit Amiga models, the 1200 and CD32. Why, though? There doesn't seem to be anything technologically strenuous going on here, and the 16-bit Mega Drive and SNES, and even the 8-bit PC Engine all have shooting games that are faster and more frantic.

 

That's not to say that Banshee is a bad-looking game, though. In fact, all of its positive qualities are in the visual department. But they're also all the result of some really great pixel artistry, not any special effects or graphical trickery. The game takes place in an exagerrated early twentieth century kind of setting, and all of the backgrounds and sprites are full of detail and life. One thing worthy of highlighting is the way that soldiers die. You're mostly fighting vehicles of varius kinds, but there are tiny little infantrymen running aorund and shooting at you, too. Sometimes when you shoot them, they'll fall over into a pool of their own blood, sometimes they'll crumble into a pile of bones. Sometimes, if you're quick enough on the draw to blow up the transport bringing them to the battle field, they'll flee from the wreckage, with their clothes ablaze.

 

For reasons I'll get into later, I only managed to get as far as the second stage, but it's set in the capital city of the enemy nation, and it's even more full of details. You see women pushing prams, soldiers on roofs who fall to their doom when you shoot them, or riding round the streets on motorbikes, with a gunner in a sidecar shooting at you. I could keep going on about all the cool little things I saw in the relatively small portion of the game I played, but I guess I have to get onto the reasons why all of these things represent a tragic waste of effort and talent.

 

The first problem you'll encounter is that your weapons feel incredibly weedy. Power-ups are rare, and seemingly ganded out at random, meaning a lot of the time, you'll only get useless junk (you can shoot the items to change them into other items, but each one only has between one and three possibilities, and a lot of the time, none of them will make you any more powerful. Another thing that seems to be random is how much of your power you get to keep upon death. Sometimes you'll stay at the same power level, sometimes it'll be slightly diminished, and sometimes it's straight back to the default peashooter. The second problem is one that dawns on you after you kill your first boss: the stages are insanely long. That first boss you kill, if it ended the first stage, would have represented the end of a stage with a perfectly fine and normal length. It actually represents you having gotten a third of the way through the stage, with two more boss fights to (eventually) reach and survive.

 

Another weird thing is that there's no music in the game! Not even in the CD version! I feel like shooting games as a genre are known for having great soundtracks, so one that doesn't have one at all seems very strange, and it feels a little cheap, too, to be honest. It really feels like the pixel artists for this game were let down by everyone else working on it. Looking at Lemon Amiga, this was very well received by magazines at the time, with no review scores lower than 80%. Now, the Amiga specialist magazines I can kind of see, they were clinging to a zombie system and some of the writers might not have played any console or arcade shooting games. But even Gamesmaster, a multi-format magazine, gave it a glowing review and a score of 83%! Doing their readers a disservice, all of them. I won't, though: don't play this game, it's not fun.