Pitch black night sky is the warzone, fireworks are your arsenal and starsigns your enemies.
Your vehicle is a small ball that you can move around with the stylus. On the upper screen is the sky and all the enemies that you shoot at with rockets. There's a small tutorial in the beginning of the game where you learn all about shooting and how the mechanics behind it works.
You see all the worlds on the menu as folders (like in Yoshi's Island, remember?) so it's early on obvious that you have to clear X worlds and Y stages. Every world has an end boss and a completely different theme where not only the enemies, bonuses and the star meter (I'm getting to this in a bit) but even your own ship changes. The menu is at least as colorful as the explosive stages and they are blessed with a very catchy song that I caught myself humming on both on the train, in the shower and when doing the dishes.
The gameplay! Let's get to it! No more digression! You navigate on the lower screen whilst shooting up on the upper screen to hit enemies. The rockets that miss their target explodes in colorful bullets that rain down together with the ordinary enemy bullets and has to be avoided to be able to continue. It's pretty much basic stuff in the beginning, you shoot a lot of rockets - many of them hits enemies and many of them misses. Then the game slowly introduces new abillities to give the gameplay a bit of variation, like for example homing rockets and shield barriers.
"Big Bang Mini is like a little audiovisual treat."
I briefly mentioned the star meter before and that I would get to it. Now I'm getting to it. Every defeated enemy turns into a little neon star that falls down into the lower screen. If you catch it the star meter fills up a bit and when the meter is completely full the stage is cleared. After each stage you enter a bonus mode where a starsign hides. It's then your job to reveal it through some method depending on which world you currently are in. The starsigns are made up and can be everything from lonely fishermen to bats and airplanes.
The stages are pretty short and you could beat the whole game in just one sitting if it wasn't so cute and pretty. You kind of don't want to stress through the experience and tend to play one world at a time. Apart from the main story there's also extra missions, games with certain rules and multiplayer. I very briefly tried the latter and it was immensely fun to play against a friend. We held our DS' like books and saw each other on the screen that wasn't the stylus one, then it came down to a very simple and pure thing. Shoot. Shoot everything you possibly can while dodging the other player's effort. There was only three areas to visit in the multiplayer but there still was variety through special bonuses we got during combat where we, amongst other things, could darken the other players screen and things like that.
I can't shake the feeling of this being a home made project. It's superficial and short. But it has other strengths, it's stunningly beautiful and hypnotizingly addictive. It's best in small doses, which I honestly think all portable games should be. Pure action, auto save after each stage and an awesome song. Sometimes it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Big Bang Mini is like a little audiovisual treat.
