Pang Adventures (PC)

Pang, also known as Buster Bros., is a series that hasn’t really evolved much from its arcade debut. 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. 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. Unfortunately, it appears Pang Adventures is mostly just more of the same.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Red balls move around like bouncing balls while blue ones will ricochet about and ignore gravity. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Pang Adventures isn’t always an action game focused purely on survival, some stages difficult more because of their puzzling layouts. 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. This gives a few levels a trail and error feeling, but the puzzle solving approach isn’t necessarily bad in concept. 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. 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. 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.

The other two modes on offer are similar in that they are both a world tour. 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. Score Attack, however, gives you a set amount of lives, and if you lose them or don’t earn enough extra lives to continue playing, it ends the run and forces you to start from the beginning. Score Attack suffers from the fact so many of the levels are puzzles rather than reflex focused challenges as you can’t feel out the solutions safely in real time, although unlike in Tour mode, death in a level retains all your already popped balls rather than reverting the stage back to its start every time. Still, it’s a follow-up mode to playing the Tour mode at best, and Tour does at least a serviceable job of keeping its progression fresh. The Pang brothers are called upon once again to repel an alien invasion, the aliens apparently mostly attacking with these large splitting balls. The adventure takes you to a few places around the globe, some with very nice looking backgrounds such as Hong Kong’s city at night or a lakeside in Scotland with a distant castle hanging over the water. The locations don’t really tie to how the gameplay is being shaken up too often, although crabs are introduced in the beach levels who can help you pop balls with their claws so there was at least an attempt for some parity with the locations.

The weapons are perhaps the best complication to be found to Pang Adventures’s gameplay, with many of the puzzle levels defined by their inclusion and even the regular levels becoming more satisfying to play once you’ve swapped in a replacement for your rope gun. The simplest is a rope gun that can have more rope shots out at once, and despite the simple concept, it is still a welcome addition since it has the same unlimited ammo aspect your usual gun has while also being able to be fired rapidly with fewer consequences. The flamethrower though has a powerful output that will easily roast balls with such speed that you can eliminate one large sphere and all its splintered orbs in less than a second if it’s lined up right, but only if its within the flamethrower’s short range. Shurikens launch in four directions and embed in surfaces to poke any balls that touch them, the laser gun will blast through a line of balls instantly, and the minigun fires bullets upwards at incredible speeds. The weapons are not only welcome for making clearing out the balls an easier task, but many levels integrate these pretty well into puzzle designs as well. If you don’t use the limited ammo for these specialized weapons right you can be in an unwinnable situation, and with special energy barriers that only block balls or block your shots exclusively to complicate their use, the weapons are all around the strongest introduction of variety the game sees. It can’t make up for the generally plain level design, but it keeps things from becoming too stale as you are given new tools to guide how you play through the short stages.

THE VERDICT: Pang Adventures is Pang as you’ve already seen it before. The ball splitting action is still a design with some appeal, and Panic mode’s survival angle is an easy to return to format for some decent fun, but it’s not a formula built to keep you invested. The world tour featured in the campaign tries to design some levels as puzzles to bring a different style of play to the affair, but tight timers and not enough new mechanics keep them from ever achieving their full potential as well. You can still find plenty of stages with nifty uses of the satisfying weapons, and little shake-ups like the ball-popping crabs and energy barriers add just enough variety to the progression. The little changes prevent the game from growing tedious, but while the levels are different enough to keep the action moving, they aren’t shaken up to the degree that Pang Adventures ever really excites so much as it successfully keeps your attention with decent play.

And so, I give Pang Adventures for PC…

An OKAY rating. Pang Adventures doesn’t have any fresh ideas on how to stand out from its predecessors or copycats. Run Ghost Run and even the original version of Pang provide about the same fun as Pang Adventures, and none of these three examples really rocks the boat with anything that breaks away from the core premise of your rope dart splitting some spheres again and again until you’ve won. Pang Adventures does have some fun weapons thrown into the fray, the bosses at least ask for a different approach, and the puzzle stages are a fine concept if they weren’t also in Score Attack and the timer wasn’t so tight. A Pang puzzler could be an interesting direction to fully embrace, and Panic mode shows that more of an action focused has some appeal, it just needs more ideas to become something greater than a score challenge you can while away time with. Enemy variety really feels like it might be what could help Pang Adventures grow into something greater, and while seagulls drop eggs and spiral-shelled hermit crabs can drop down on you in some stages, the final boss is the real show of how you can make the enemy more than a hazard and focus on different ways to play within the Pang formula.

Pang Adventures was released in 2016, and while the Pang series sometimes takes breaks longer or shorter than five years, it does seem like another title is due on the horizon if the general pattern doesn’t disappear. Pang Adventures feels like the first “modern” title in the series despite rehashing a lot of the same ideas as older titles, so whether the adventure continues or the series is content to just let it keep selling on perpetual storefronts like Steam remains to be seen. A game isn’t better or worse because it fails to bring new ideas compared to its predecessors, but the problem is the Pang formula needs a shakeup beyond just a few different weapons and ball types to really make the most of its design. The series can continue to settle for being alright, or it can start seeing what kind of gimmicks or alterations can help this style of play evolve into something great. Pang Adventures is still a fine enough way to experience this ball busting play style, but the fact you can say that about so many of its other iterations or the unabashed clones like Run Ghost Run shows that Pang Adventures needed to do more than be colorful, accessible, and a little clever with its puzzles to stand out from a niche genre that it should be leading the way in.