Bank Panic (Sega Master System) review "Trigger Fatigue"

PANIC!

A bank is being robbed in an almost by-the-minute occurrence. When will it end? Who can we trust to put a stop to this lunacy? You! As the brave gunslinger, in a bold white outfit and a yellow cowboy hat, your job is to protect this establishment from masked hooligans who arrive with their guns raised. You'll do this alone, but surely staring at one or two entrances won't be overwhelming.

This bank has 12 entrances for some reason.

Interestingly, you'll rarely see this fearless protagonist on screen, as Bank Panic takes place in a first-person viewpoint behind the bank tellers. With limited movement, you can only shift to the left and right, and only three doors are visible on screen at any given time. The game kinda-sort takes place in real time, meaning people are constantly walking up to all the doors even when not on screen. So how can you possibly manage such a daunting task?

With the help of a "radar" on the top portion of the screen, you can monitor all 12 doors. During the early stages, you'll see red bars casually drop down on doors on this radar, indicating that people have arrived. Graciously, the doors only open when your character's perspective shifts over to them. This doesn't mean you can linger in each stage indefinitely, as there is a time limit; even then, if you linger within this time limit, the game takes the extra step of placing ignited dynamite on certain doors that you must shoot!

Why go through such dramatic lengths to have the player open doors? That's because the stage-by-stage objective of Bank Panic is to receive money from citizens. You're a bank, that's what you do. Manage to get money bags at all 12 doors and you've won the stage. But considering past bank robberies, you know this won't be so simple.

Go to a row of doors waiting to be opened and the following plays out: either a citizen drops off their money bag and/or you're faced with a masked outlaw ready for trouble, with variations mixed between the two. Here's when you draw your weapon to eliminate the threat! But since the action is in first-person, the game has an interesting take on firing your weapon. When first starting out, you realize that there's no on-screen target cursor and there is no light gun peripheral involved with the combat.

Basically, each fire button on the controller corresponds to an on-screen door, with button 2 reacting to the right, button 1 to the middle, and Up on the D-Pad to the left. This is easily manageable, but things quickly escalate and more focus is needed. For example, three doors open at the same time, with burglars on the left and right, and a citizen in the middle. You fire with Up and button 2; the right burglar goes down, but the left one deflects your bullet, requiring a swift second shot. You succeed, but there's a twist: while you were distracted by the burglars, the middle citizen was pushed aside by another burglar!

With other shooting games, firing at an opponent would be a straightforward matter. But Bank Panic has an interesting mechanic based on how you shoot robbers: if you shoot before they raise their guns, it's considered "unfair" and you only receive 100 points for your troubles. Based on the concept of quick draw, the faster you take someone down after they draw, the more points you gain. If you take down a bandit within nine milliseconds, you get 1000 points, and if you have AMAZING timing and take someone down at zero milliseconds, you're rewarded something much bigger.

If you're not into scoring in video games, this may not be a big deal, however, if you're aiming for extra lives, only gaining 100 points is not an ideal scenario. You'll need as many lives as possible, because once you run out, there is no continue option in this game.

For something that appears so innocently-basic at first glance, Bank Panic has a lot going for it in terms of gameplay and mechanics. It's the age-old adage of something that's easy to learn, but hard to master; as you climb through the stages, the robbers become more frequent, showing up in droves and requiring shorter draws before they fire back. A high level of concentration and eye-hand coordination is needed, as it is very easy to have an itchy trigger finger and shoot a citizen. You really can't make that mistake either, because you will lose a life if an innocent is blasted.

But with much regret, there is one major, unnecessary issue which needs to be addressed that drags down the overall quality of the game. The instruction manual states that the main goal is to complete 50 stages, however the difficulty escalation jumps up way too fast and aggressively. By the time you reach the 10th stage, the robbers fire their weapons incredibly fast, meaning that waiting just one millisecond is a huge risk; you'll have to go for the "unfair" shots to survive. This is irritating because it makes the fun quick draw encounters obsolete, effectively removing a mechanic.

Another problem is that the game becomes unreasonably overwhelming. Like, you literally have to fire your weapon the moment it reveals who is behind a door just to live. This clearly causes absurd situations, especially with instances where you have to deal with multiple doors opening at slightly different times; it's very, very easy to injure a citizen due to the increased "challenge" giving you anxiety. This is frustrating because the raised difficulty is not working with the game to make everything work, instead feeling like it's working against the structure.

Sadly, this is likely the result of Bank Panic being a port of an arcade game, thus the devs going the oldschool route of making it stupid hard for replay. Gotta have players plunk in more coins to increase sales! What's most disheartening is that the game's structure is good; when you're playing those first nine stages, the basic gameplay combined with its rules of engagement make it a fun playthrough. Difficulty escalation is doable, but going from zero to 100 is not the way it should have went.

As is, this bank can't be saved.

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