Bang! Gunship Elite can best be described as “Space Combat Lite.” It’s halfway between
Galaga and
Freespace in complexity, and although it’s quite entertaining, there’s not all that much meat on the (very, very pretty) bones.
In Bang! you are a fighter in the Alliance, trying to stop the Sektar threat. There’s some stuff about a substance called Kha that basically makes the world go ‘round, but plot is pretty much icing on the cake in this game. You get briefed before each battle, the narrator telling you what you have to do. It can range from simply blowing ships up to escorting to everything in between. Mostly, it’s blowing things up.
The cockpit springs to life around you as soon as you enter the game, and there are lots of nifty little doodads. You’ll learn to ignore most of them pretty quickly, though, as the radar in the bottom center and the health display are all you really need to pay constant attention to. You fly around and blow ships up, using an assortment of weapons that grows pretty much every mission. You start off with a namby-pamby Ion Blaster, but get cooler and cooler weapons as the game progresses.
There’s nothing particularly deep when it comes to the gameplay here. The enemy A.I. is sometimes quite intelligent, hiding behind various space debris so you can’t cap them too easily, but a little hunting around will always get you your ship. Once you master the art of finding enemies on your radar and seeking after them, the game is basically an extremely fast-paced seek-and-destroy title.
And perhaps that is Bang! Gunship Elite’s main flaw. There’s nothing much else to it. Sure, they mix up the missions a bit, but never enough to make you feel like you’re doing something really unique in the game. And as entertaining as wasting enemies with large weaponry is, it’s not necessarily going to keep you going for hours.
