Maroc - 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 02/Feb 00:01

Bronana – Review

Bronana is a survival roguelike that adds on bullet-heaven aspects and has a distinct arcade feel. The name suggests that Busy Bear Games, Bronana‘s developer, took some inspiration from Brotato for their first original game. So let’s join the banana clan and see what innovative twists they added to Bronana.  Story Despite not being explicitly shown when you first start up the game, Bronana has a story that is present in the environment and the cinematic. You play as part of the Banana clan, a group of bananas trying to push back the corruption caused by an evil food-processing factory. This caused the innocent ingredients to be turned into mutated monsters. This is reflected in the gameplay in two ways: the further you progress the more ‘factory’-like your surroundings get and the enemies you face are more and more processed/unnatural ‘foodstuffs’. Despite this humble premise, it makes for a nice storyline, once you know it. It is a shame that this is never explicitly brought to the player’s attention. The NPCs you meet during your runs, the boss enemies, and the death screen all stay silent about this storyline. Graphics At first glance, the key art implied that Bronana‘s visuals were an afterthought during development with its simplicity. However, while playing the game it becomes clear that the graphics follow a consistently smooth style in both design and color. This helps maintain a good overview of the game, even when you are being overwhelmed by a horde of enemies. As a yellow banana, the player character stands out against the more muted, drab backgrounds and enemies. The enemies, consisting of various food items, are also colored but are slightly less saturated. This guarantees you remain easily distinguished even when surrounded by the yellow popcorn buckets. Two minor drawbacks both concern the in-game text as most longer text isn’t properly formatted which makes these descriptions harder to read. Additionally, some player attributes are simply not translated, which complicates the reading experience even more. Sound Similar to its graphics, Bronana’s sound design prioritizes quality over quantity. The game features only two themes: the main menu tune and the music that plays during runs. However, both tracks are well-crafted, easy to jam to, and they enhance focus on the objective, which is eliminating processed foodstuffs. These themes are complemented by a small selection of sound effects that provide clear audio cues, helping players stay aware of the action. Gameplay The gameplay was simultaneously the best and worst thing about Bronana.  As a Vampire Survivors clone it thrives on adding plenty of customization options to a bullet-heaven roguelike to make every consecutive run different and exciting. Bronana does so with gusto, however, that is also its downfall. Throughout the game, you have almost too many options and too many special effects. At the core of its gameplay, Bronana is still a roguelike, but the sheer magnitude of options is a daunting wall of text. When coupled with the fact that, besides a few basic mechanics, almost nothing is properly explained to the player, this creates a very frustrating early game. You have weapons, equipment, and accessories, all of which have different stats and different special effects that interact with your player attributes in some way. You have to combine figuring out these effects and getting through the levels. Accessories are the easiest to understand. These are items you can get as a reward or buy from the shop that modify your attributes as long as you have them in your inventory. Weapons and equipment introduce some additional effects. Weapons are fairly intuitive, as the upgrade feature is introduced during your first run. When you acquire multiple of the same weapons or equipment of the same grade they automatically upgrade into a higher-quality tier. Additionally, weapon attributes are displayed in an infobox when hovered over, along with the relevant pictograms of said attributes for easy reference. The main frustration lies with the equipment. Some pieces have a set bonus or special effect, but the game does not reveal these effects until you purchase and equip the item. This forces you to spend valuable resources, risking a significant investment of resources on a bonus that may not suit your current run. Luckily you are never limited to the initial options, as you can use the money you earn during each level to refresh the selection screen, as long as you have the necessary funds. Besides changing your random chances through this currency and buying items in the shop, you can use the money you collect to participate in various events. These events include but aren’t limited to, giving money to a beggar with no personal gain, playing darts with a circus banana for random rewards, gambling with a blacksmith to (hopefully) upgrade your gear, and purchasing items from the banana devil. The first customization choice you make is ironically the final one we talk about: selecting your character. The character you choose decides the pool of weapons you have access to. You start with Tom, a general-purpose banana. As you make progress with Tom, you can unlock new characters by meeting certain attribute thresholds. These new characters come with their own, different, attribute bonuses and specializations. Their speciality is referenced with the attribute you need, range for a ranged damage specialist, poison damage for a poison specialist, gold bonus for a thief, and dodge for a samurai. Even though there is only one game mode, the extensive customizations more than make up for it. The single game mode features five difficulty levels, each with two adjustable settings: one that controls the nature of NPC events and the market prices and another one that changes the difficulty of the end boss. These two settings each have three levels. One frustrating aspect of the game is the auto-aim feature, which is set to ‘High Threat’ by default. This leaves you with a weapon that doesn’t always target as you’d expect unless you manually change it to ‘closest’. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if you were told what makes an enemy ‘High Threat’ or if you were told about the setting. Even with this adjustment, however, when handling two weapons that act independently, you may still find yourself walking into enemies you thought were already vanquished by your weapons. Conclusion Bronana delivers an engaging roguelike experience with plenty of customization and a unique, wacky story that enhances the gameplay. The minimalistic graphics and sound design complement the action, creating an immersive experience. However, the overwhelming number of options, unclear explanations, and frustrating auto-aim system can make the early stages very challenging and make for a very steep learning curve. Despite these issues, Bronana‘s extensive customization and replayability offer significant rewards for players willing to navigate its learning curve. In conclusion, Bronana proves to be an overall enjoyable adventure if you can look past its flaws.