Item: Balancelot
Rating: 2.5
Author: Family Gamer Reviewer

Take on the role of a poor squire that is trying to live out his dreams by getting into the kingdoms jousting tournament, however not able to afford a horse, he is forced to use a unicycle to reach his dreams.

General Gameplay

Banancelot is a 2D game that is all about balancing your squire on a road, defeating enemies, making jumps, and keeping your balance while trying to reach your level goals. On your path through 50 different levels of balancing, you must face enemies, with your lance and defeat them. The Game Visuals are created in a pastel cut outs to showcase a medieval era of knights, jousting and monsters. Banancelot does a good job of showing off the game in this fashion to tell the story and have the look and feel of the medieval times. The game graphics are bright and easy enough to see on the screen, but there is no colorblind mode, however the colors on the screen are extremely easy to see on any screen. In our playtesting, we did not encounter any issues with the game graphics. Audio in Banancelot is fun to hear. As the game story told by a narrator of the journey the game has spoken dialog. Outside of some crude humor, the game audio is fine for all ages to hear above the age of 10. All of the game sounds that you would expect to hear in the game from a medieval from jousting sounds, enemies and a decent background music. The game is presented in 5.1 surround sound and in 2.0 stereo and either sound environment is fine to hear. In our play testing, we did not encounter any issues with the game audio, outside of some crude humor. Controls in Banancelot are done with the shoulder buttons, the left and right ones balance the squire, and the face button is used to jump and another one to use the lance to fight off enemies. We had a lot of issues with the controls for the game, and we will cover this more in our Family Friendly section. In our play testing we had some issues with the game controls and as the game is on the console there is no need to use a special controller to play Banancelot.

“A funny story, but with horrible control, frustrating and boring gameplay, this is game for those that love balancing games.”

Family Friendly

There are games that are fun and easy to play and at times there are games that are stone cold hard to play, this is all about how the developer goes about creating the game. Some games are designed to be more family friendly and easy for all ages to play, and games that are designed to be punishing and only for more hard-core fans of series of games like this. Where Banancelot gets this wrong is that the game is not fun, but more frustrating. The controls are awfully hard to use and as this is a game about balance, it is hard to balance the squire. Just alone in the tutorial level, our testers failed around 50-60 times before even reaching the end of the level. This proves to be very frustrating to many of our testers, especially the ones that are good at balancing games. This alone where you cannot even get to the end of a tutorial level is just bad coding and gaming overall. I wish that there was something positive that I can say about this game but there is not. Unless you are extremely bored or want to truly test your skills at a balancing game then we would recommend getting Balancelot, otherwise avoid this game. In our special needs game testing, outside of the concerns that we listed above, we did not find anything with the game visuals, and audio, the controls is a total train wreck, and this is not a special needs game to play.