Ace Banana by Oasis Games for the PSVR puts you into the shoes of a banana archer. Your aim is to try to protect other bananas from hordes of invading primates, looking to quite literally skin you alive.

The game plays homage to the bright cartoonish visuals and easy to pick up and play controls of any casual game. Its “levels” are segmented by waves of enemies. Starting off simple and manageable while gradually ramping up the difficulty the more waves you clear. You’ll have several areas to defend, attack all the while managing various attack patterns and collecting power ups and downs.

Gameplay

It’s probably best to think of Ace Banana as a turret game. Players will find themselves zipping around between three different vantage points, trying to protect the supply of bananas at each location. That means that enemies essentially run directly at you along each of the tracks.

As the overrunning force begins to bear down, dispatched primates will start to drop items. Once these power-ups have been shot and gathered, it will affect the flight trajectory of the remaining arrows in the quiver. Suddenly there will start to be quasi-heat seeking projectiles, oddly flying arrows with pillows attached to their ends, or even the ability to fire off three arrows at a time.

Pro-Tip: If you really want to feel like a professional archer, try firing off a triple arrow with the bow cocked sideways. This way you can unleash three times the defensive destruction along a horizontal plane, using only a single shot!

Drawbacks

As you might imagine, having crowds of monkey clones washing over you wave-after-wave would get a little monotonous. Thankfully, the developers have mixed it up with a few quirky varieties of monkeys that are thrown into the mix. Each character has their own quirks and animations, and there’s even a couple of lemurs thrown in there.

One of the issues with Ace Banana is the erratic motion controls. It tends to get out of sync once in a while, due to the camera and control issues. The actual movement detection as well proved pretty challenging. There was always a weird float to the aiming reticle. While this isn’t that big of a deal in early waves, it becomes a gigantic and virtually insurmountable obstacle to overcome later on.

Conclusion

Ace Banana is a title that will definitely hold the attention of a younger or more casual gamer. But the large amount of bugs and inaccuracies of the controls affects the experience dramatically. Hopefully these issues will be resolved in a later patch.