Casting my mind back to 1990 I have incredibly vivid
memories of sitting at my friend’s house in front of his Commodore Amiga
playing a little game called “Pang” for hour after hour. Now 26 years later comes Pang Adventures, an HD reimagining
of the original arcade classic for PS4, Xbox One, PC, & mobile, taking everything you loved from
the originals and giving them a lick of paint, great new music and sounds, and
a host of new features. For the uninitiated the premise behind Pang is thus, you’re
given a single square of screen where bubbles are added and it is your job to
pop these bubbles using your spear gun, as you pop the large bubbles they split
into two smaller bubbles, which each then divide into two more even smaller
bubbles and so on until finally disappearing but in the meantime chaos ensues,
get hit by any bubbles and you’re dead, oh did I mention this was all against
the clock too?
Tour mode makes a very welcome return in this version,
opening with a short scene about aliens launching attack balls across the globe
and calling the Pang brothers into action, there’s over 100 levels scattered
over different locations from Boro Boro to Scotland each with increasingly
tough challenges to master. The newest addition to the series is boss fights, as you
move between stages you’ll find your plane intercepted by an alien commander
requiring you to not only dodge his attacks and take him down but also avoiding
and popping more bubbles bouncing around the screen. Initially you’re armed with just your spear gun but as you
explode more balls they’ll randomly drop power-ups, items that increase the
amount of spears you can launch at a time, equipping you with a flamethrower, a
machine gun, or even shurikens to launch at your spherical foes, one thing I
really liked was when firing the machine gun for a long period your character
lets out a cry as if being shaken by the gun’s recoil, just a nice little touch
that made me chuckle.
Once you’ve played
through an amount of Tour mode, Panic Mode is opened up to play and is one screen of more and more bubbles that as you pop them the level increases and in turn so does the difficulty, giving you 3 lives
to start and then bombarding you for as long as you can hold onto them for. There is also Score Attack, this unlocks once you’ve
completed Tour Mode and basically replicates the original arcade experience, minus the dark and smoky arcades with sticky floors of the early 90's, 3
lives and no continues, can you save the world under these conditions or will you
be defeated and forced to start over? Each of these modes allows for local multiplayer, which at
time of writing I had yet to try out but have every intention of inviting my mates
round and reliving the Pang sessions of yesteryear, maybe not including the glasses
of weak lemon squash and seemingly infinite biscuits provided by our mums back
in the day. Graphically Pang Adventures is very faithful to the
originals, this time though everything is so crisp and clear and beautiful, the
colours are bright and the effects are subtle but great, though more noticeable
during Panic Mode as you increase levels and activate power-ups, even the
backgrounds to each stage are bright and detailed with neat little touches. The music is possibly one of my favourite things about this
new version keeping some of the original tunes but giving them a new tweak and
twist, retro sounding beats pump out over the menus and throughout the game
modes, never intrusive but catchy enough that I did find my toes tapping at
times and even humming along with the theme on the title screen. To begin with I thought it might be a case of rose-tinted
glasses as to why I was excited to see Pang being rereleased after all this
time but after playing for a while I actually found myself needing to go do
something else but saying “I’ll just have just one more go” and then realising
another hour had gone by and I was still engrossed, that knee-jerk reaction of “I can do
it this time” when going for your 50th attempt to complete a level. Pang Adventures is a great trip down memory lane with enough
new ideas to still feel fresh, it remains unique to this day and here’s hoping
we see another version in the series sooner than another 26 years.
Pang Adventures is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam, iOS & Android