Hello Panda

Once again strolling through RMN, I see the random section gives me another game that took my interested: a shmup. A bullet curtain shmup at that. Interested, I downloaded the game to try it out.

When you load up the game, you are greeted by a red logo. After the logo the theme from Kill Bill plays and you see three pandas within the red and black background. You select start and you can select from one of three pandas. Afterwards you get a wall of text that describes the story. You are part of a band of female thieves called Hello Panda who are after a painting said to be a weapon of mass destruction and the Hello Panda girls set out to capture them from their owners. And the game begins.

Unlike many smups, this does not take place in the air. You play a woman in a panda costume just casually strolling on the carpet. These girls must be pretty confident on themselves to casually walk inside someone's manor like that. The enemies consists of special agents and maids with some who attack weird machines that shoot out bullets. Not sure what these things are exactly. Could be a gun of some kind. In the tradition of bullet curtain shooters, the screen fills up with bullets and you must maneuver yourself so that no bullet touches your collision box.

Now here's the weird part of this game: the blood. The blood takes center stage in this game. First off, the main characters, Hello Panda, can control blood at will. I don't know how they do this but when you kill an enemy, their blood will automatically be transferred into your body, which fills up a gauge. When you need a powerful weapon to dispel alot of enemies, press X and you shoot out a ray of blood that will deal more damage to your enemies. Yeah...I don't know how to explain this but apparently blood can damage your enemies somehow. Now if a blazing ray of blood isn't weird enough, you can press space and for ten seconds, you unleash a giant beam of bloom at the entire screen. Again, I don't know how the heck blood can be used in this manner to destroy enemies but it does. Lastly, I don't know about the other characters, but looks like the first panda, Artemis, shoots out blood from her gun.

Not to mention, the whole game seems to have a bloody scheme to it. Like 97% of this game is red, the sides of the main game look like it's splashed with blood, even the loading screen looks like a blotch of blood. Needless to say, this game is pretty bloody, which kinda disturbed me in a way.

As for the gameplay, it plays really well. The character maneuvers smoothly and the bullets are not that hard to dodge, at least at the first level on the easy level. If it's too easy, you have up to 3 other difficulty levels to choose from. So the gameplay is fun but it then gets repetitive. There are like only 2 enemies I've seen thus far and they take multiple hits so they can get annoying. The background is nothing special. It's just the floor. Levels change eventually but it remains constant throughout the entire level. And it's always red. ALWAYS red. That gets boring after a while.

So this game is fun but then feels the same over and over again. Check it out if you like shoot-em-ups but don't expect alot of twist and turns. It's pretty straight forward.