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Bangai-O Spirits is a very difficult game to put into words.  It’s part action, part puzzle, part shoot ‘em up, and even part builder.  Treasure Co. has managed to pack so much into this DS game.

The games premise is you control a giant robot who had several different weapons and equipment at his disposal.  You then must enter a stage and complete the objective.  Simple no?  Well that’s about the easiest part of this game.

The game is broken down into 3 different game modes.  The main game mode has you traversing through Treasure’s pre-made stages destroying preset targets.  Generally there are hundreds of enemy missiles and bullets flying at you while trying to obtain this goal.  The next mode is a puzzle mode where it’s much less about destroying and more about solving the stage’s tricks. You are able to play these stages with your friends over local DS wi-fi.  It’s a competitive co-op where you work together to beat the stage while competing to score the most points.

The last mode is a create a stage mode.  It allows you to create just about any stage you could want. What makes this mode different is that you are allows to send your stages to friends but not through a wifi server but through sounds.  So you either need to have your fiend’s DS right by you or have very strong recording software and send the sound file to them.  The idea is interesting but adds some unwanted work for people without the knowledge to record audio.

With all these features the games sounds like a smash hit.  You’d be right if not for one major flaw, two if you have very little patience.  The big flaw for Nukoda staff is that the game slows down far too much.  The game allows so much action to be active on screen that the game will slow down to a crawl for seconds at a time after using your special attacks.  One would say then not to use them but those special attacks are critical to success.  Though, if you are an optimist you can look at the slow downs as a feature that let’s you look around the screen more since everything is moving slower, sadly I’m not that optimistic.

The only other complaint that could be brought up about Bangai is that it is very hard.  Though this level of difficulty is a nice change of pace from recent DS releases.  The game wants to you try different weapons and tactics for each stage.  Since the majority of them are short, it doesn’t feel as angering as a game that has less stages but each one is longer (Metal Slugs).  You can easily sit down for five minutes and try and beat a single stage.  Yet each time you die, you feel like you are getting closer and closer to perfection.  When that moment happens where you do everything right and you beat a stage, the gratification you feel is unmeasurable.

Overall this game will make you mad, yet you’ll find yourself popping it in for 10 minutes at a time trying to beat a state just one more time.  The replay value alone puts this game above many other titles.  Though with it’s slow downs due to too much action on screen, does make this game not as appealing as it could be.

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