The Windows Phone Marketplace has Angry Birds where you toss birds from a slingshot, Twitter Hunter where you try to shoot at the birds and now you have Banzai Birds where you aid birds parachute safely to the ground.
Game play is simple, birds begin a free fall to the ground and at some point you tap the screen to deploy their parachute. Sounds simple, right?
Drop on past the break to see how simple Banzai Birds can be.
Again, the goal of Banzai Birds is to parachute your birds to a safe landing on the target zone.
To help with the challenge, you have a target to land on and a timer to beat. Open the parachute too soon and time will expire before you land. Open the parachute too late and you crash into the ground.
You maneuver the falling bird by tilting your Windows Phone to the left or right. For bonus points, worms will mysteriously hover in the sky for you to hit. You also have owls to dodge and boulders to navigate around on your journey to the ground. The owls can be down right vicious at times.
Naturally the closer to the center of the target and faster you land will also add to your point totals. Once you successfully land your bird on the target zone, you get to move to the next level. Currently there are 20 levels to Banzai Birds with more to come with future updates.
Banzai Birds was a fun game to play for short periods. There are a few performance issues that requires a little patience. Mostly lag times between the 3,2,1,Go! prompt and the bird beginning its descent. You have to tap the screen when you see Go,Go,Go to start the decent. At times there is a lag between the 1 and Go,Go,Go as well as a lag time between taps and seeing the bird begin to fall. This can cause precious seconds to run off the clock and with a game where seconds count, this can be critical.
All in all, Banzai Birds was fun to play. It won't keep you hooked for hours but for a game to help pass short periods of time with, its not a bad choice. Banzai Birds is a free, ad-supported game that you can download here (opens Zune) at the Marketplace.
UPDATE: Banzai Birds was recently updated. Where we expected additional levels instead, the first twenty were re-designed, adding more obstacles and owls into the mix. You still have the lag time present at the start of each level and the levels are more challenging (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). We also experienced a few instability issues that locked the game up when you deployed the parachute. The re-design of the levels gives the game a little more edge but the stability bugs and lag times hold this game back.
