Inclement weather on the horizon: bullet rain, blood runoff in the streets, industrial parks desecrated by their own designs. No glorious anthems play in the background, just stings of death, the musique concrete of battle. A Wellsian steam-plane leads the charge, swerving and shooting past all that approach it. The pilot smirks, then grins in morbid delight. "Let 'em wail, like any of them can stop me!", he cries. Like a flying shark, the well-dressed dilletante in his top hat and goggles then gores the seas, cities, and alien motherships of his time. It's just the flight man's burden.
"Earth, 1999. But the Earth [is] of a different timeline. There are no microwave ovens and TV is still in black and white." Banshee's manual tells a simple premise: as Sven Svardensvart, steampunk viking he is, you must defeat the imposing Styx Empire, first by liberating a thinly-disguised United States from the aliens before hijacking their technology to escape Earth and face the Styxians on their own planet. It's a humans vs. invaders plot in a vertical arcade shooter, what more does one need? In the peanut gallery, I hear five words: "Anything but an Amiga shmup!" And make no mistake, I did a lot of research before settling on my first Western STG from the microcomputer glory days. There's a wide range in quality between, say, Tyrian and Xenon 2: Megablast (it's okay, Bitmap Brothers, you made up with The Chaos Engine later). American and European PC shooters tend to suffer in key ways which reflect either (a) developers' crippling isolation from Japanese arcades and fan communities around which major innovations could foment, and/or (b) a focus on presentation and pushing technology at the expense of fun, skillful play, and optimized controls. Extra negative points if the game in question targets a genuinely obscure or difficult-to-obtain platform like the 3DO or, in this case, the ill-fated Amiga CD32. With so many CD32-first games bombing commercially and critically, how well could this one hope to do?!
I'm happy to say that Banshee mostly avoids those pitfalls. This ended up less like a poor Scandinavian take on Toaplan, Capcom, and Konami STGs than I feared; at times I felt like I was instead playing the best parts of Flying Shark or 1943, now without the fuss or bumps in difficulty (at least until the end). Though hardly without flaws, or any ambition beyond a polished take on WWII-adjacent STGs, I was impressed by the first impression this title gave me, and those new expectations held up for the most part.
| Fly with me and the daring Swedes |
Banshee wouldn't exist without the rakish vision of Søren "Hannibal" Hansen and Jacob Anderson, who brought their game to Core Design and got the publishing greenlight for a cross-Europe release. To their credit, Core also provided Martin Iveson, their veteran in-house musician, to help score the small but groovy EDM soundtrack introducing and ending each playthrough. But beyond manufacturing, distributing, and paying royalty checks, Core left this program to its contract creators. There aren't any differences between the Amiga 1200 (floppy) and CD32 (uh, CD) versions, apart from loading times for the latter. Emulating the latter was actually more consistent on my end when playing in WinUAE, but I'll chalk that up to misconfiguration.
Right away the game launches into stage 1, a vast expanse of ocean spanning multiple screens' worth of playfield. Enemies only respawn within the player's view frustum, as is typical, and astute players will quickly notice the health-bar on left. Banshee only commits one of the supposed cardinal sins of Euro-shooters by letting your plane take multiple hits before meeting its violent end. Here, though, the developers have very good reason to give players some leeway: this game has no continues. Yep, you just read that. It's 1994 and some devs somewhere still had the courage to prevent quarter-feeding entirely. Just learning the first stage, then, becomes a priority simply to gain ground and attune to Hansen & Jacobsen's rhythm of design.
Of the more classic influences here, 1942 and Twinbee stick out the most, with loop-de-loop attacks and shootable power-ups in play. The former allows you to temporarily escape fire, damaging anything under your path in the process, while the latter gives players the chance to switch power-up types so long as they can keep the item on-screen. That 'ol juggling act's back, in steampunk form, with a need to both defend against enemy waves, evade tricky patterns, and keep the ship in tip-top shape for what's to come. I found myself using loops as infrequently as expected, while I took my time on each run flipping pickups until I got just what I needed. Need to wreck some large but ponderous aircraft? Cycle to the missiles and get ready to dodge more fire than normal. Scared of incessant UFOs and boulders on the horizon? Like most shooters, there's a perfectly usable spread-shot ability worth nabbing. Best of all is the "build-up" system. Upon collecting three of the eponymous upgrades, your best weapon status gets saved for your next life. This reduces the frustration of accidentally dying to a boss and only having a pea-shooter upon revival, or when forgetting to pick up shield upgrades partway through a level. Overall, there's solid meat-and-potatoes STG design happening here—nothing revelatory, but more considerate than its Amiga peers by and large.
| "Blardax Maldrear, uglier than a Phreenian Foot-toad" |
Making one's way to Planet Veenix, the throne-world of this story's antagonist, won't be easy even with the aforementioned abilities and lifelines. Banshee's true sin is not pacing itself better, featuring four very long levels which, while diverse in environs, tend to drag like in weaker Compile STGs. Couple this format with no way to continue and we've got ourselves an often frustrating adventure. Hitting 1-up thresholds and keeping the build-up meter at max becomes its own game, one you'd be foolish not to master. Hannibal & Jacobsen are perfectly happy to take their time, slowly iterating on enemy groups and shot patterns with breathing room to spare. This feels great when the run's going according to plan (or, in the learning stages, at least feels manageable), but one bad turn and the urge to restart grows. This urge comes upon me something fierce in stricter genre examples, like Raiden or Hishousame, so to sense it here saps some of my enjoyment. Many patterns and mini-bosses felt a bit underbaked, too, though not enough to ruin the experience. While this program could stand to run at a faster framerate, it's decently smooth as is, and the keyboards controls are as intuitive as the glossy brass UI.
Something this game never falters with is its B-movie sense of humor, both in visuals and sound design. I've seen a couple reviewers compare the art-style in Banshee to a mix of Cannon Fodder and Metal Slug (maybe some Boogie Wings as well), with deep earthy colors and attention to detail in the unlikeliest places. Pseudo-World War vehicles and soldiers all scramble to swat you down from the skies, yet their own deaths range from grisly to gallows humor. Burnt lackeys wither to bone and dust; city-goers mind their own business while a 1 vs. 1000 war rages across avenues; lighthouses, factories, and hulking ships all go up in brilliant flame and debris once the titular craft has its way. I'm not sure what's more sad, the fate of these brainwashed Gis or the thought of having one less unexpectedly hilarious STG to play. Canned PCM-audio cries of agony and constructs shredding into chaos make great use of the Amiga's Paula sound chip. And let's not sleep on Iveson's moody electronica during loading screens, a helpful reminder of just how '90s this game is.
The latter half of Banshee takes off the kid gloves, moving us from seaside bases and an Edwardian metropolis to icy, arid wastes before taking a climactic journey into the stars that'll make Metal Slug 3 blush. It's here where the no-continues, no-checkpoints structure can either heighten tension for the better or spoil a good run. The key factor which Hansen & Jacobsen nailed was balance; rarely did I ever feel unfairly outgunned or juked by the game. It's honestly designed from start to finish, even in the final half-hour's worth of intertwining projectiles and kamikaze attacks. Don't go in expecting a swerve towards danmaku leanings, or any overabundance of stage hazards (though some sequences dabble in them to great effect). Think Jamestown but with a more conventional arcade-y template and a comparatively refined minute-to-minute game loop. For lack of a true Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow shoot-em-up, this can fill in the blank for the foreseeable future.
| Stir in an Alternative Dimension |
Core Design had a talent in the early '90s for featuring the best works of just anyone they could find off the proverbial Amiga street. Sure, most of their releases were self-developed projects, but they had a frequent collaborator in The 8th Day (Heimdall [2], Premiere) and adopted other outside teams' works a few times, always to great results. I think it's telling that something like Banshee arrived in time to herald the CD32's push for games that could directly compete with better offerings on NEC, Nintendo, and SEGA platforms. Don't get me wrong—these efforts weren't successful, and the CD32 was stillborn despite the occasional bright spot like this game. But there's a fascinating "what if?" to consider where Core, Team17, Psygnosis, Rainbow Arts, Ubi-Soft, Cryo, etc. put their all into accessible yet unique games that could have buoyed the ailing Amiga marketplace.
Banshee in particular feels like the kind of throwback arcade shooter which rarely happens today. Its level of sincerity, genre awareness, and muted presentation is a hard sell to those browsing digital stores now, expecting more "bang for your buck" features and runtime. But back in 1994, this could still pass for a full-price release; some groans about just four levels aside, there's plenty to engage with here when playing for score. I haven't yet tried Hard difficulty yet, but Normal feels, well, the way a normal and engaging STG of the time should. Press outlets all had loads of praise for the title, with many proclaiming it the new standard in Amiga shooters against a slate of competing games. Most of those accolades are hard to take for granted, given the dearth of strong original STGs on any Western PC by then, but reviewers and fan letters were on to something, however quaint their opinions have become.
The transition to 3D and multimedia-driven consoles, along with dwindling outlooks on the arcade industry and its game design trends, meant there'd be little room for something like Banshee to take root and thrive. If Japanese shooters were starting to have trouble staying relevant to all but a niche audience, then what more could those dubious Euroshooters hope for? Banshee could handily showcase some of the finest AGA-accelerated Amiga graphics around, but the pursuit of 2D excellence largely became the task of versus fighters and xRPGs. Hansen & Jacobsen must have seen these changes coming, soon joining Scavenger Inc. to work on their technically-outstanding games A.M.O.K. and Scorcher for PC and Sega Saturn. The coder eventually worked his way up into Shiny Entertainment and then Microsoft, while the artist found footing later at IO and now Unity. I hope this game, among other formative Amiga-era works, hasn't just become a footnote to overlook, but a case study in how to nail design fundamentals and make something more than the sum of its parts.
All my waffling aside, Banshee is worth one's time when looking for a solid mid-'90s PC shooter. Worst case, you could even play through this for the "I beat a Euroshmup!" credo without feeling robbed of that hypothetical better game. It's a bit janky in spots, but only noticeably so due to the game otherwise working as well as it does. There's enemy variety for days, a lonely but fitting soundscape, and four rounds of generally well-paced action to dig into. I doubt it sold any CD32 units back in the day, but that's no longer a concern when WinUAE makes this easy to boot up and enjoy with a controller of one's choice. Now, if only *I* could get my hands on an impossibly well-equipped biplane for my own battles…
"Earth, 1999. But the Earth [is] of a different timeline. There are no microwave ovens and TV is still in black and white." Banshee's manual tells a simple premise: as Sven Svardensvart, steampunk viking he is, you must defeat the imposing Styx Empire, first by liberating a thinly-disguised United States from the aliens before hijacking their technology to escape Earth and face the Styxians on their own planet. It's a humans vs. invaders plot in a vertical arcade shooter, what more does one need? In the peanut gallery, I hear five words: "Anything but an Amiga shmup!" And make no mistake, I did a lot of research before settling on my first Western STG from the microcomputer glory days. There's a wide range in quality between, say, Tyrian and Xenon 2: Megablast (it's okay, Bitmap Brothers, you made up with The Chaos Engine later). American and European PC shooters tend to suffer in key ways which reflect either (a) developers' crippling isolation from Japanese arcades and fan communities around which major innovations could foment, and/or (b) a focus on presentation and pushing technology at the expense of fun, skillful play, and optimized controls. Extra negative points if the game in question targets a genuinely obscure or difficult-to-obtain platform like the 3DO or, in this case, the ill-fated Amiga CD32. With so many CD32-first games bombing commercially and critically, how well could this one hope to do?!
I'm happy to say that Banshee mostly avoids those pitfalls. This ended up less like a poor Scandinavian take on Toaplan, Capcom, and Konami STGs than I feared; at times I felt like I was instead playing the best parts of Flying Shark or 1943, now without the fuss or bumps in difficulty (at least until the end). Though hardly without flaws, or any ambition beyond a polished take on WWII-adjacent STGs, I was impressed by the first impression this title gave me, and those new expectations held up for the most part.
| Fly with me and the daring Swedes |
Banshee wouldn't exist without the rakish vision of Søren "Hannibal" Hansen and Jacob Anderson, who brought their game to Core Design and got the publishing greenlight for a cross-Europe release. To their credit, Core also provided Martin Iveson, their veteran in-house musician, to help score the small but groovy EDM soundtrack introducing and ending each playthrough. But beyond manufacturing, distributing, and paying royalty checks, Core left this program to its contract creators. There aren't any differences between the Amiga 1200 (floppy) and CD32 (uh, CD) versions, apart from loading times for the latter. Emulating the latter was actually more consistent on my end when playing in WinUAE, but I'll chalk that up to misconfiguration.
Right away the game launches into stage 1, a vast expanse of ocean spanning multiple screens' worth of playfield. Enemies only respawn within the player's view frustum, as is typical, and astute players will quickly notice the health-bar on left. Banshee only commits one of the supposed cardinal sins of Euro-shooters by letting your plane take multiple hits before meeting its violent end. Here, though, the developers have very good reason to give players some leeway: this game has no continues. Yep, you just read that. It's 1994 and some devs somewhere still had the courage to prevent quarter-feeding entirely. Just learning the first stage, then, becomes a priority simply to gain ground and attune to Hansen & Jacobsen's rhythm of design.
Of the more classic influences here, 1942 and Twinbee stick out the most, with loop-de-loop attacks and shootable power-ups in play. The former allows you to temporarily escape fire, damaging anything under your path in the process, while the latter gives players the chance to switch power-up types so long as they can keep the item on-screen. That 'ol juggling act's back, in steampunk form, with a need to both defend against enemy waves, evade tricky patterns, and keep the ship in tip-top shape for what's to come. I found myself using loops as infrequently as expected, while I took my time on each run flipping pickups until I got just what I needed. Need to wreck some large but ponderous aircraft? Cycle to the missiles and get ready to dodge more fire than normal. Scared of incessant UFOs and boulders on the horizon? Like most shooters, there's a perfectly usable spread-shot ability worth nabbing. Best of all is the "build-up" system. Upon collecting three of the eponymous upgrades, your best weapon status gets saved for your next life. This reduces the frustration of accidentally dying to a boss and only having a pea-shooter upon revival, or when forgetting to pick up shield upgrades partway through a level. Overall, there's solid meat-and-potatoes STG design happening here—nothing revelatory, but more considerate than its Amiga peers by and large.
| "Blardax Maldrear, uglier than a Phreenian Foot-toad" |
Making one's way to Planet Veenix, the throne-world of this story's antagonist, won't be easy even with the aforementioned abilities and lifelines. Banshee's true sin is not pacing itself better, featuring four very long levels which, while diverse in environs, tend to drag like in weaker Compile STGs. Couple this format with no way to continue and we've got ourselves an often frustrating adventure. Hitting 1-up thresholds and keeping the build-up meter at max becomes its own game, one you'd be foolish not to master. Hannibal & Jacobsen are perfectly happy to take their time, slowly iterating on enemy groups and shot patterns with breathing room to spare. This feels great when the run's going according to plan (or, in the learning stages, at least feels manageable), but one bad turn and the urge to restart grows. This urge comes upon me something fierce in stricter genre examples, like Raiden or Hishousame, so to sense it here saps some of my enjoyment. Many patterns and mini-bosses felt a bit underbaked, too, though not enough to ruin the experience. While this program could stand to run at a faster framerate, it's decently smooth as is, and the keyboards controls are as intuitive as the glossy brass UI.
Something this game never falters with is its B-movie sense of humor, both in visuals and sound design. I've seen a couple reviewers compare the art-style in Banshee to a mix of Cannon Fodder and Metal Slug (maybe some Boogie Wings as well), with deep earthy colors and attention to detail in the unlikeliest places. Pseudo-World War vehicles and soldiers all scramble to swat you down from the skies, yet their own deaths range from grisly to gallows humor. Burnt lackeys wither to bone and dust; city-goers mind their own business while a 1 vs. 1000 war rages across avenues; lighthouses, factories, and hulking ships all go up in brilliant flame and debris once the titular craft has its way. I'm not sure what's more sad, the fate of these brainwashed Gis or the thought of having one less unexpectedly hilarious STG to play. Canned PCM-audio cries of agony and constructs shredding into chaos make great use of the Amiga's Paula sound chip. And let's not sleep on Iveson's moody electronica during loading screens, a helpful reminder of just how '90s this game is.
The latter half of Banshee takes off the kid gloves, moving us from seaside bases and an Edwardian metropolis to icy, arid wastes before taking a climactic journey into the stars that'll make Metal Slug 3 blush. It's here where the no-continues, no-checkpoints structure can either heighten tension for the better or spoil a good run. The key factor which Hansen & Jacobsen nailed was balance; rarely did I ever feel unfairly outgunned or juked by the game. It's honestly designed from start to finish, even in the final half-hour's worth of intertwining projectiles and kamikaze attacks. Don't go in expecting a swerve towards danmaku leanings, or any overabundance of stage hazards (though some sequences dabble in them to great effect). Think Jamestown but with a more conventional arcade-y template and a comparatively refined minute-to-minute game loop. For lack of a true Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow shoot-em-up, this can fill in the blank for the foreseeable future.
| Stir in an Alternative Dimension |
Core Design had a talent in the early '90s for featuring the best works of just anyone they could find off the proverbial Amiga street. Sure, most of their releases were self-developed projects, but they had a frequent collaborator in The 8th Day (Heimdall [2], Premiere) and adopted other outside teams' works a few times, always to great results. I think it's telling that something like Banshee arrived in time to herald the CD32's push for games that could directly compete with better offerings on NEC, Nintendo, and SEGA platforms. Don't get me wrong—these efforts weren't successful, and the CD32 was stillborn despite the occasional bright spot like this game. But there's a fascinating "what if?" to consider where Core, Team17, Psygnosis, Rainbow Arts, Ubi-Soft, Cryo, etc. put their all into accessible yet unique games that could have buoyed the ailing Amiga marketplace.
Banshee in particular feels like the kind of throwback arcade shooter which rarely happens today. Its level of sincerity, genre awareness, and muted presentation is a hard sell to those browsing digital stores now, expecting more "bang for your buck" features and runtime. But back in 1994, this could still pass for a full-price release; some groans about just four levels aside, there's plenty to engage with here when playing for score. I haven't yet tried Hard difficulty yet, but Normal feels, well, the way a normal and engaging STG of the time should. Press outlets all had loads of praise for the title, with many proclaiming it the new standard in Amiga shooters against a slate of competing games. Most of those accolades are hard to take for granted, given the dearth of strong original STGs on any Western PC by then, but reviewers and fan letters were on to something, however quaint their opinions have become.
The transition to 3D and multimedia-driven consoles, along with dwindling outlooks on the arcade industry and its game design trends, meant there'd be little room for something like Banshee to take root and thrive. If Japanese shooters were starting to have trouble staying relevant to all but a niche audience, then what more could those dubious Euroshooters hope for? Banshee could handily showcase some of the finest AGA-accelerated Amiga graphics around, but the pursuit of 2D excellence largely became the task of versus fighters and xRPGs. Hansen & Jacobsen must have seen these changes coming, soon joining Scavenger Inc. to work on their technically-outstanding games A.M.O.K. and Scorcher for PC and Sega Saturn. The coder eventually worked his way up into Shiny Entertainment and then Microsoft, while the artist found footing later at IO and now Unity. I hope this game, among other formative Amiga-era works, hasn't just become a footnote to overlook, but a case study in how to nail design fundamentals and make something more than the sum of its parts.
All my waffling aside, Banshee is worth one's time when looking for a solid mid-'90s PC shooter. Worst case, you could even play through this for the "I beat a Euroshmup!" credo without feeling robbed of that hypothetical better game. It's a bit janky in spots, but only noticeably so due to the game otherwise working as well as it does. There's enemy variety for days, a lonely but fitting soundscape, and four rounds of generally well-paced action to dig into. I doubt it sold any CD32 units back in the day, but that's no longer a concern when WinUAE makes this easy to boot up and enjoy with a controller of one's choice. Now, if only *I* could get my hands on an impossibly well-equipped biplane for my own battles…
2 Comments
TY, and I worry I'll have trouble finding a better phrase to describe a shmup with no BGM but deliciously compressed soundscapes.
Amiga shooters are an odd bunch. Looking at the best examples on LemonAmiga, it seems like the platform has a few great run 'n' guns (Chaos Engine, Ruff 'n' Tumble, Alien Breed II and beyond, maybe Turrican II), followed by solid verts like Hybris/Battle Squadron and SWIV. There's a 2023 homebrew vert called Reshoot 3 Proxima which looks promising, too, but outside the scope of what I'd deem a classic Euroshooter. (Paradroid also got a remake for Amiga, but I hear that plays way better on Commodore 64.) Beyond that, Apidya and Disposable Hero seem like the main choices for hori STGs, and have a reputation for ball-busting difficulty like their Irem/Konami influences. Plenty for me to dig into later.
Amiga shooters are an odd bunch. Looking at the best examples on LemonAmiga, it seems like the platform has a few great run 'n' guns (Chaos Engine, Ruff 'n' Tumble, Alien Breed II and beyond, maybe Turrican II), followed by solid verts like Hybris/Battle Squadron and SWIV. There's a 2023 homebrew vert called Reshoot 3 Proxima which looks promising, too, but outside the scope of what I'd deem a classic Euroshooter. (Paradroid also got a remake for Amiga, but I hear that plays way better on Commodore 64.) Beyond that, Apidya and Disposable Hero seem like the main choices for hori STGs, and have a reputation for ball-busting difficulty like their Irem/Konami influences. Plenty for me to dig into later.
curse
4 months ago
review's a certified banger