When you think of fireworks, you usually think of a celebration, a massive light show after some grand event. When faced with floating monsters, your first thought probably wouldn’t be to shoot off a few fireworks at them.

That’s about to change. Big Bang Mini is here to show you the deadlier side of fireworks. Let’s just say that after emerging from this game’s 90+ levels, you’ll never look at Independence Day in the same way again.

At first glance, Big Bang Mini comes across as your average shoot-em-up. You move around on the bottom screen while firing explosives at the monsters that drop bombs on you from above. However, Mini does have a couple of neat quirks that make it a tad bit more memorable. For one thing, your shots are actually fireworks. Why does this matter? Isn’t a firework basically a pretty explosion? Ah, but when a firework explodes, it sends sparks in every direction. The result is that you not only have to avoid enemy bombs, but the remnants of your own attacks.

This single adjustment is what really separates Big Bang Mini from your standard bullet-hell. You can’t just swipe your stylus a million times per minute. Shot spamming is the quickest way to die. Instead, you have to be precise with your shots. You have to consider timing and the angle of your firing. Of course, those floating monsters don’t really care about whether or not you’re busy thinking. They’ll continue to fire at you no matter what, so your reaction times must be quick. In fact, they need to be doubly fast as you can’t move and shoot at the same time.

Sounds hard, eh? It is pretty difficult, but the game does give you a few helpful powers to deal with the stress.

For instance, the arctic stage allows you to manipulate the frozen winds to blow shots away from you be moving the stylus in a spiral. Another stage lets you shoot homing missiles by holding down a trigger while shooting. How well do the stylus-based controls work? Most of the time they are just fine, but the likelihood of screw-ups rises as the action gets hotter. During the really frantic levels, I would often move instead of shooting and vice-versa. Even when the action was calmer, aiming a shot at an exact angle could turn into an act of frustration. Shooters traditionally demand a high level of precision, and Big Bang Mini’s main fault is that the touch-screen interface can’t quite meet that level.

Big Bang Mini is, in my mind, a bridge of sorts between the casual stress-free shooting of Space Invaders and the impenetrable bullet-hell of Ikaruga. It’s the shooter for the Touch Generations gamer looking for something that is a little more difficult and a little more rewarding. Big Bang does a great job of explaining its gameplay and introduces new mechanics at a perfect rate. The early levels of each stage are deliberately easy to give you the breathing room to explore new mechanics. That difficulty steadily increases in such a manner that you’ll definitely be sweating by the end. Basically, it’s a shooter that casual gamers will have some fun with and a shooter that won’t put hardcore shmup fans to sleep.

Throughout each level, you watch the action from the perspective of someone who is constantly having a bad acid trip while looking out of a train window. Bright colors surround him and this glowing orb keeps shooting fireworks everywhere. And if that wasn’t weird enough, the sky is full of these creepy, bloated circus monsters. What I’m getting at is that visually, Big Bang Mini is a really fun game to look at. It’s colorful and the little glowing particles being thrown everywhere add to the visual sensory overload. Each stage takes place in a different country, and each stage’s backdrop and monsters all draw from a theme derived from the location. In the Chinese stage, you’ll have to watch out for pandas hanging on balloons and freakish dragons. Of course, you’ll be too busy dodging shots most of the time to really take in the scenery. When you do get a little bit of breathing space, it’s a pretty cool-looking game.

What should really seal the deal for DS owners looking for a new shooter is the fact that Mini is only $20. Those twenty smackers get you a whole lot of game. The standard arcade mode is made up of nine stages, with ten levels and a boss each. Between each level, you’ll get a little bonus where you must attempt to form a constellation without screwing up the order of the stars. If the arcade mode isn’t enough, you can unlock a mission mode that gives you certain objectives to complete. There are a few other bonus modes as well as multiplayer. All-in-all, you’ll get roughly thirty hours of gameplay out of Mini.

If you’re a shmup fan with a DS, you don’t really have a choice. Big Bang Mini is a required part of your collection. Come on, it’s a well-designed shooter with some interesting mechanics and a difficulty level that challenges without the extra frustration. Even if you haven’t played a shooter since the old days, you may want to consider it for your arcade fix. Big Bang Mini is an addictive little game that won’t break the bank.

Positives: Fun gameplay, easy to learn, bargain price, lots of content, cool visuals.
Negatives: Stylus control is a little imprecise.

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