Banzai Escape 2: Subterranean

This one is built for the crew that already keeps a Discord call open on weeknights, and it is a straight walk-away if your idea of co-op means four controllers and one sofa. Banzai Escape 2: Subterranean does its socialising online or not at all, and once I stopped waiting for a local option to appear in the menus, the rest of it clicked a lot faster than I expected. What you are actually playing is a third-person action shooter wearing anime dressing over modern warfare kit. You control a clone sister pushing down through an underground dungeon network, clearing a path room by room, and most of the character of the game comes from those two halves rubbing against each other. The presentation is unapologetically anime, the gunplay is not. Sprint into a junction without checking your angles and you will get taught the lesson quickly. It continues on from the events of Banzai Escape 2, though nobody makes you sit an exam on the previous game before handing you a rifle, and the underground setting keeps the geography tight enough that you are rarely lost for long. The co-op is the reason to show up. Solo works, and the pacing holds together on your own, but the whole thing sharpens the moment a second player is in the tunnels with you, calling out a room you cannot see into or covering the corridor behind while you push. Corners and chokepoints are the entire architecture of an underground map, which means two competent players cover far more ground than one, and a bad player in the wrong doorway is genuinely funny rather than run-ending. Sessions chunk nicely into an hour or two, so it slots into a weeknight without demanding you clear a weekend. Cloud saves and achievements are both in, which sounds like box-ticking until you are the person in the group who plays on a laptop at work and a desktop at home. Steam sentiment sits Very Positive across a decent sample, and having spent time in the tunnels I understand why. It is not trying to be a genre landmark, it is trying to be a focused co-op shooter with a clear identity, and it lands that. Now the parts that will annoy you. There is no local play here at all, so my usual test (can four people who have had a few drinks pass controllers around and still have a good time) simply does not apply. If your gaming happens on a TV with friends physically in the room, close the tab. This is PC only too, so console-first friends are out of the group entirely, and that is a real problem when co-op is the main draw. Online co-op in a small self-published game also lives or dies on whether you can fill a lobby, so treat this as a bring-your-own-friends purchase rather than something you queue into at midnight trusting matchmaking to sort out. Play it solo if you must, but going in expecting a lively public playerbase is setting yourself up for disappointment. The other thing worth setting expectations on is scope. This is a small studio self-publishing an action shooter, and it plays like one in both directions: focused, unpretentious, no bloated systems demanding you engage with a battle pass, but also without the polish layer a funded team buys you. Menu presentation and animation are functional rather than lavish, and the enemy variety across the dungeon network gets familiar before you are done. On a gamepad it is perfectly playable, though if you are the sort who lives in a controller-remap screen, check the options before you commit rather than after. None of this is a dealbreaker if you understood what you were signing up for, and all of it is irritating if you walked in expecting a big-budget shooter with anime hair. So: get a friend, get a headset, block out an evening, and go clear some tunnels. It is a good time with the right person on the other end of the call, a decent time alone, and a waste of your evening if what you actually wanted was couch co-op. Know which of those three you are before you commit.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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