A Look At AmiTen’s Coco Banana – Full Review

Coco Banana is AmiTen’s second full release Amiga game. It was released in December 2018; their first game (The Dream of Rowan) was released back in December 2017.

AmiTen is most likely best known for the controversy around their game releases over the last few years. I won’t dwell too much on that, as all I can say is that the Amiga scene can be a horrible place when you get enemies.  I’d go as far as saying that I am quite surprised to sit here with 2 full game releases from AmiTen today, most people would have given up way before there had even been a beta release.

I wasn’t all that fond of The Dream Of Rowan really, I sort of expected more after the first few previews and for some strange reason I thought they would iron out all the problems before releasing the final game, to be honest, it felt like if they had not even looked at the problems at all so the preview was more or less identical to the final product (and this resulted in me not writing a 3rd and final article about the game).

Now, a few years later, a much more polished and visually appealing game has arrived. It’s another platformer, and while it looks far better, it still builds on many of the same core mechanics from Rowan. My biggest worry going in was that it might just be a reskinned version of Rowan.

At first glance, the game already looks leaps and bounds ahead. The parallax scrolling adds depth and brings the world to life, and there are now plenty of enemies to keep things interesting. In many ways, it plays more like the game I had hoped Rowan would be—clearly, the developers have learned a lot from their earlier project.

There are a few oddities in the game, particularly with the mechanics. The music tries hard to be something it isn’t, and as a result, much of it falls flat—mostly mediocre, with a few moments that are just okay (World 3’s music is one of them). The boss fights, for example, play adequately, but the music had me reaching for the mute button more than once.

Coco Banana might look great in screenshots and videos, but unfortunately, it just isn’t very fun to play—not nearly as engaging as it should be.

The main reason for this lies in the game’s design. You scroll through a few screens, then a few more, shooting enemies and picking up items. That doesn’t sound terrible, but there are no real missions beyond finding keys, and—most importantly—there’s almost no player feedback. Without clear goals or responses to your actions, it’s easy to slip into “zombie mode” while playing and quickly grow bored.

What about the Box then? Well, first of all, it has to be mentioned that the Dream Of Rowan Box was pretty decent, really, a nice DVD box with a good mix of colours, and it looked rather good all in all. 

The Coco Banana DVD Box, though, looks great at first, but once you take a closer look then you notice the backside colours and how hard it is to read the text. Another complaint is that the box really doesn’t follow any standards either, which is a common thing on Amiga these days, sadly. 

The game CD looks good too, but for some reason, it is just a CD-R with a label on it…

There are 5 rather big worlds, all with the typical styles like Sand, Snow, Castle and so on, I liked world 3 the most which were a snow level with a rather cool end of level boss, but with that said i also enjoyed the last world quite a bit, the music was rather catchy there and for some reason I felt the gameplay was a bit better in that world compared to the others.

Technically the game fails a bit, yes it is written in AMOS and there are limitations because of it but the game requires a 68020 and 2MB of Ram, the strange part is that it requires 1MB Fast Ram and 1MB Chip Ram which means that the game won’t work on a bog standard A1200 nor CD32 which is sad, I ran the game full speed on my CD32 with the SX-1 add-on but that got a ram upgrade (and an HDD).

AmiTen have grown a lot the last 5 years for sure and when you compare the efforts and look at the sheer amount of time and love put into the projects is when you realize that these guys do it for themselves the most and that is fair really, they never aimed for AAA standards but they did aim for something that many can only dream of, doing 2 full-sized games on Amiga.

Summary:

At the end of the day, Coco Banana has to be seen as a Public Domain project that’s priced far higher than it probably should be. Early on, many Amiga fans were happy to support it because we wanted more content for the platform. But after two full-price releases, that goodwill may have run its course—most people aren’t likely to pay a premium for another PD game anytime soon.

If the project fails, it’s easy to blame the surrounding controversy, but the AmiTen team has contributed far more to the Amiga community than most of the loudest critics out there.

Should you support AmiTen and buy their games? My answer is a cautious yes… and no. The price needs to come down significantly to make their offerings appealing again. Right now, it might be wiser for them to focus on selling existing copies and rebuilding their reputation before diving into a new project.

I wish Johnny, Luis and Dani the best, and I am looking forward to their next project (if any).

Screenshots are from LemonAmiga (you guys are a lifesaver, thanks!) as well as Amiten’s page; box shots are from my own collection.