![]() Tour has you progress through levels, immediately able to retry them on death and able to start where you left off after exiting the mode. The other two modes on offer are similar in that they are both a world tour. This Panic mode is actually quite enjoyable for its arcadey action, this playing into Pang’s natural design strengths quite well since you need to watch your movement and firing carefully but still stay active and quick. There is a Panic mode devoted solely to survival, balls appearing at set intervals with score being the main goal and power-ups coming in not to help you solve a hard arrangement but just to give you more firepower or ways to turn the situation to your advantage. It can be satisfying to realize how to utilize the level geometry and power-ups to your advantage, but mixing together levels where you can just shoot like mad to win with these stages that require thought makes for an uneven experience at times. This gives a few levels a trail and error feeling, but the puzzle solving approach isn’t necessarily bad in concept. Every level in the main adventure has a timer that is often fairly tight, meaning that you will have to figure out when to fire to avoid balls being out of reach or splitting in suboptimal ways. Pang Adventures isn’t always an action game focused purely on survival, some stages difficult more because of their puzzling layouts. Most Pang levels are just about clearing away those balls, and while some add puzzle elements such as needing to figure out how to predict bounces off barriers or utilizing power-ups to overcome impossible odds, the final boss is about knocking out the enemy’s barrier and timing when you launch special attacks appropriately, all while fending off the usual balls as a background challenge. They are all built pretty similarly but diverge in the types of balls they summon, how they teleport around, and how their laser eye attacks manifest, but the final boss of the game is a far more involved battle that actually shifts up how you play Pang in a way that could have spiced up regular levels as well. ![]() There are even boss aliens you fight in Pang Adventures, these creatures tossing out different ball types as you shoot at their tentacles to wear them down. Explosive balls will tick down after you first shoot them, detonating to clear out other balls and proving to be a good means to eliminate crowded areas or electric balls. Some balls are electrified, meaning your rope will become a killer conductor after you shoot them and you need to flee your attack to avoid electrocution. ![]() Red balls move around like bouncing balls while blue ones will ricochet about and ignore gravity. However, the need to iterate on this idea is where Pang entered its rut, but it does at least attempt some of the simpler ways to achieve variety. It’s an amusing little concept which rewards proper aiming without being too difficult, and the splitting ball mechanic leads to a fluid difficulty increase as more balls that are harder to hit flood the play area. You won’t be able to just rapid fire your weapon because the rope needs to hit something before disappearing and allowing another shot, and if that means waiting the second it takes for it to hit the ceiling, you could be left vulnerable for firing sloppily. Those balls will split apart when shot as well until the balls become too tiny to split apart any further, a level completed once every ball has been removed from play. If the ball makes contact with any part of that rope after it is fired and before the shot disappears from play, the ball will split into two smaller balls. Touching one of these will result in an instant death, but you pack a little weapon that fires a rope tipped with a sharp point. Playing either on your own or with a friend, you are placed in box shaped levels where large balls bounce around the borders of the screen. The Pang brothers are back to doing the same basic thing they’ve been doing since 1989 in Pang Adventures, and while it hasn’t been iterated on much, the premise at the core is a simple and somewhat enjoyable idea. Unfortunately, it appears Pang Adventures is mostly just more of the same. It’s a fine design for a game you pop quarters into, but it really feels like Pang needs something new to stand out from the original games and its imitators. Every five years or so it seems to get a new installment that repeats the ball breaking formula of the original, maybe adding in new enemy types or weapons but still carrying over that 2D single room style of play where you pop floating balls that split apart when hit. Pang, also known as Buster Bros., is a series that hasn’t really evolved much from its arcade debut.
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