Desura Look - BANZAI PECAN: Last Hope for the Young Century

In a post-apocalyptic future, a young woman transforms into a super heroine to fight for justice. Her adversaries? The Seven Deadly Succubi that captured her boyfriend. Banzai Pecan is a single-plane beatemup. Expect to pound the stuffing out of a legion of bunny-girls, and...well maybe it's better just to not bother at all.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. Banzai Pecan has a lot of moves, and more are unlocked as the game progresses. There's a dodge ability, the standard "get off me!" attack that pushes everyone away, and finishing moves (like the classy taco-breaker). Some unique enemies are thrown into the mix every now and then as well.

The art-direction is...well it is what it is. I guess I've become desensitized to this sort of stuff. Yes there are a lot of busty women in tiny outfits. That's not the problem with this game. The problem is the mechanics. Mechanics. Mechanics. MECHANICS! When making a game, mechanics are the most essential part! Without them you might as well not even have a game, it's just a simulation where things happen when you press buttons. Banzai Pecan is essentially a button-masher. Situations are resolved simply by continuing to attack. The dodge ability doesn't really work because there's simply not enough time to respond when an enemy does a powerful attack. Mixing dodges in with all the punches and kicks sounds like a good idea, but it just looks goofy in practice and the player ends up getting hit anyway.

For the most part bosses are easy, You can take half their health just through button-strings. At the half-way point their AI wakes up, which means they'll break out of combos with different attacks. It's not really challenging, just frustrating. When they hit the last 1/3 of their health they start doing super moves. These attacks will wipe the player out, but they can be countered. The trick is to be standing in the right spot and hitting the attack button. It's a rather poor idea, since most of the time I'm likely to stumble into the right spot.

Banzai Pecan isn't on Steam (yet) so I'm hoping a lot of time was spent re-balancing and working out the various issues in this game. This is one of those games where everything is in place, but it falls apart when someone sits down to actually play it. More a curiosity than anything. One more classy pic for the road: