Genre: Shooter
Publisher: Southpeak Games
Developer: Arkedo Studio
Release Date: January 21, 2009

Big Bang Mini is a new, somewhat quirky shooter for the DS, wherein you pilot a small triangle that fires fireworks at various balloons, creatures and other oddities to collect stars and max out your level meter, allowing you to move on to the next stage. It's definitely a different premise than other shoot-'em-ups, but genre vets will realize that regardless of the trappings, there are a lot of similarities between this title and other top-down shooters.

There's not much of a story to get involved in, and all you need to know is handled by the thorough, but quick, tutorial that then unlocks the versus and single-player mode. In single-player, you'll be presented with nine different locations, each with 10 stages, including a final boss battle, where you pilot your triangle on the DS touch-screen. The controls are all stylus-based, and you'll pilot your "ship" by dragging it around the screen with the stylus, while you try to avoid incoming fire and the fallout sparks from any missed fireworks that you've launch.

When it comes to the actual fireworks, you'll launch those to the top screen by simply scratching upward with the stylus, and depending on the angle, you'll end up exploding the fireworks at the top screen or hitting one of the many objects or targets that appear. The goal is that for every target you hit, a star will fall down to the bottom screen that you'll need to catch with your triangle. To the left, you'll notice that a meter slowly starts to fill for every star that you catch. Once this meter fills up, the stage ends, and you'll move on to the next one. There's also a small bonus section, which is basically a connect-the-dots challenge that creates various constellations, but they don't really add much to the game.

Once you finish nine stages within a city, you're granted access to the boss battle, which is the major challenge in Big Bang Mini. While it can be difficult to simultaneously focus on moving your triangle and dodging fire while launching your own attacks, the boss battles will really test your abilities. It's not quite a game that some players will call "bullet hell," but a few of the bosses come really close to being ridiculous with the amount of fire they can dispense. It's a solid challenge to wrap up the final battles in the game.

Certain stages, along with multiplayer, will make use of power-ups that you can activate by pressing a direction on a d-pad. These add different bonuses, of course, but they're not always present or easy to come by, so you'll want to hold on to them until they become absolutely necessary. Keep in mind that at the outset, you won't come across these, so don't think that you're missing out on something. Just about every stage has its own unique property or ability, such as the winds that throw off your trajectory in Aurora or the homing ability that's activated with the L or R button on Kamakura. Likewise, each stage contains its own unique set of enemies, and there's a pretty solid variety of bad guys at whom to toss fireworks.

Multiplayer mode makes use of two players, and it can be done with just one cart between two DS systems. There are three stages to pick from, and players will compete while holding their DSes in a book style, similar to the setup of a few puzzle titles. Along with multiplayer, there's challenge mode, which allows you to use Wi-Fi to upload your score against a global leaderboard, and relax mode, which more or less allows you to sit back and watch the pretty spectacle of fireworks without having to worry about enemies, projectiles and fallout consequences.

Graphically, Big Bang Mini is pretty simple, with your ship consisting of a geometric shape that's a bit reminiscent of Geometry Wars, but the enemy designs are all pretty solid and well-designed for each location. The game is super colorful, as you might expect from something designed around the concept of using fireworks as weapons, and the later stages will toss so many enemies and projectiles at you that it can be difficult to focus on the task at hand instead of sitting back and watching all of the pretty colors pop up on both DS screens.

The soundtrack is also pretty great, and quite a few of the tunes are pretty catchy; while they do repeat a bit within the different locations, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Likewise, there's some decent FX work from the enemies and the explosions caused by the fireworks, and altogether, the sound works really well and complements the game style.

I do have some minor issues with Big Bang Mini, and that mostly has to do with the stylus controls, primarily when it comes to firing off rockets. I found that it was easier to make a series of swipes to launch as many fireworks as possible and take out multiple enemies at once, instead of trying for precise strokes to take down specific targets. Granted, this might be the way the game was intended to be played, but certain enemies will make use of shields or cloud cover to deflect attacks. The problem here is that it seemed like the touch-screen recognition was frequently off, and even though I swiped up, it would register it as something off the left or right, which made me feel like it was impossible to be precise with my attacks. Granted, I didn't feel like this was a problem when I was launching multiple rockets, since I was bound to hit something, but the touch-screen detection issues could put off new players a bit when we're first starting out, depending on their play style and how they approach the game.

Once I figured out my own particular method, I really enjoyed Big Bang Mini, and it's certainly a unique shooter for the system that manages to stand out against a few of the other notable DS shooters. I never noticed the gap between screens when firing, something that bugged me to no end on titles like Contra or Yoshi's Island, because I was so absorbed into the addictive gameplay. This is a title that's definitely worth checking out for DS owners, and while it's a relatively smaller game that hasn't received much media attention, I hope players will still give this a shot.

Score: 8.0/10