Game Hub | Game Blog --- December 20, 2025 --- Game Reviews --- Does anybody still have their Silly Bandz? I remember having a few as a kid (dinosaurs, if I remember correctly) but I never caught on to trends or anything, so I never knew it was a thing beyond just a couple cool rubber bands I had. In high school, a good friend of mine found her Silly Bandz and we reminisced about them for a while, I had no idea this was like a cultural touchstone for kids of a certain age and era. I guess technically I own Silly Bandz now, since my DS game came with an exclusive pack, though I don't think I'm gonna open them, I'd rather keep the game complete if I can. Honestly also scared they're gonna like, crumble away into dust the second they're exposed to air again lol they're probably so brittle if they streth even a millimeter beyond their neutral pose. They're cool though.

Playing the CRAZE with Silly Bandz on the Nintendo DS

I love weird, niche DS games. They might be one of my favorite things. Like, sure, Nintendo made Crosswords DS, but there was also The New York Times Crossword, and USA Today Crossword Challenge, and My Secret Diary, which also came up when I searched "Crosswords DS" on eBay. There's plenty of fun to be had in weird first-party games for the DS, but sometimes the third-parties brought us weirder, more interesting, and worse games.

So when I found out during a Melody Nosurname video that at the height of their popularity, Silly Bandz licensed the developer ZOO to make a DS game titled "Silly Bandz: Play the CRAZE" that included a pack of real Silly Bandz in the DS case, I knew that it was my destiny to play this game. It was fate. I couldn't escape it. And tonight, when a Christmas package from my dear friend Kumatora arrived early, one which she described as "kind of a silly joke gift", I knew what it was instantly. Without further ado, let's talk about "Silly Bandz: Play the CRAZE".

First of all, just holding it in my hands, it's so different from any other DS game I've held. I got it sealed, but it doesn't use an original Y-fold plastic wrap, it had to be shrink-wrapped because the Silly Bandz pack inside (tucked with the manual in the front) is enough to make the whole DS case bulge in the middle, and add some decent heft to what you expect a DS game to weigh. So right away, it's a very different unwrapping experience to any other DS game, especially when compared to other rubber band-based video games on Nintendo platforms.

Putting the game in my DSi, I was shocked to find that "Silly Bandz: Play the CRAZE" is the actual title, and not just part of the tagline on the boxart. I had assumed it was just called "Silly Bandz" and the "Play the CRAZE" was just for flair. But no, the system menu does explicitly name the game as "Silly Bandz: Play the CRAZE". Cool.

One oddity with this game that becomes immediately apparent: the menus were all optimized for button controls, when the actual levels only accept touch screen controls? Like, you can use the D-pad and face buttons to navigate every menu, but once you get into the actual level, every control is touch-based except for pause, which uses the START button. If you use the stylus to try and control a menu, 9 times out of 10 you'll have to tap a button twice; once to select it, and a second time to actually press it. It's like one person made all the menus, and someone else was designing the gameplay, and they didn't communicate about what control format was the priority for the player. It's not even really a complaint, just one of those things that makes you go "What happened here? How did this happen?"

So the main singleplayer campaign is called "Adventure", with a 2 player mode greyed out at the start. Jumping into Adventure mode, there's 4 worlds with 10 levels each, so only 40 levels overall. Clicking on level 1, it's Angry Birds. Like, it's literally just Angry Birds. You pull back rubber bands and shoot them forward to topple towers of blocks and break "cages holding your Silly Bandz hostage" (back of the box), requiring you to break every cage in a level to move forward. Each cage you break rewards you with a new Silly Band, including an extra one at the end of every level for getting every "bonus objective", namely the bonus shots and the gold and silver coins floating around. So yeah, it's pretty much just Angry Birds with a Silly Bandz twist.

The physics are different, however. It's a lot more floaty and carries farther than your average Angry Bird. This isn't a bad thing, as the levels were designed around these physics, leading to levels that are a lot longer and require more distance to reach certain objectives, as well as tricky structures that require specific arcs to hit them in the right spots. It's more of a challenge than I expected it to be, I had to retry a handful of levels in world 1 to figure out how to get where I needed to go. You won't find yourself sitting forward in awe at any aspect of this game's design, but you certainly won't be falling asleep to these puzzles, it's not nearly as mindless as I feared it might be. They even start to introduce new rubber bands to shoot as you proceed through each world, so it's not entirely uniform, it'll throw you a curve-band from time to time.

The Silly Bandz you collect in each level all contribute to a digital collection accessible from the main menu, sorted into four categories for each world: Nature, Maritime, Party, and Fantasy. There's 10 unique shapes in each world, each coming in 5 colors (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple) making for a total of 50 Silly Bandz to collect per world. Nature has a lot of animals; turtles, frogs, the like. Maritime has lots of fish, so on and so forth. I won't lie, I can't say no to a good video game collectathon. Finding unique Silly Bandz in every level and being able to add them to my collection is really satisfying. It adds onto the already decent fun of the puzzle levels themselves, and makes this overall a decently fun game.

It's nothing revolutionary in any field, but it certainly does what it set out to do. Angry Birds wasn't on the DS (even if it hit the PSP and later the 3DS), so Silly Bandz and ZOO were technically filling a popular mobile game niche at the time. In a lot of ways, it beat Angry Bird to the punch by being on a popular handheld console with a touch screen long before Rovio ever got the chance to. It's a fun, simple, addictive puzzle game with physics-based solutions, obviously riffing on Angry Birds pretty heavily, but overall charming and interesting in its own right. It's nothing to go out of your way to play unless you're a die-hard Silly Bandz fan or Nintendo DS collector, but if Angry Birds is or was your jam, this definitely scratches a similar itch without blending into the rest too much that it disappears. I know that every time I talk about Angry Birds from now on, it's gonna be followed by a tangent on "Silly Bandz: Play the CRAZE" for the DS.

~ Alex Amelia Pine

Update

Little addendum to this writeup, as I've just finished the game! It's not very long, if you're mainlining it straight through, it's got anywhere between 3 and 4 hours depending on how good you get. The game introduces a lot of neat mechanics along the way, not just with new bands to launch, but also new types of stationary blocks that cause you to bounce off in different ways, get stuck, change your trajectory, explode, etc. The layouts seem pretty boring and simple at first, generally taking some generic shapes, but once you start launching around and trying to hit bonuses, you realize that everything's been placed in such a way that really makes you think strategicly about which color band to use when, and at what angle, to try and get where you're going. The final level of world 4, and the entire game, is actually pretty difficult, I easily spent the most time on it. Again, it's nothing revolutionary, but if you're into this style of game, it can be pretty challenging, and if I were a kid in 2010 playing this game because I love Angry Birds on my iPod Touch and cutting off the circulation in my arm, I could totally see myself playing this all the time and slowly chipping away at it, 40 levels wouldn't have felt so short for sure. I think there's a lot here for what it was doing, and again, even if it is riffing on Angry Birds a lot, it's got enough flair and style that I think it's not entirely redundant. That's not to mention how difficult it can be to get the bonuses as well as beating the level (you have to do both to get the extra collectable Silly Band). There's a lot of really tricky layouts that don't leave a lot of room for error, and if I ever feel like playing it again, which I genuinely do think I'll get the urge to at some point, I do intend to go back and start 100%ing levels by getting all those bonuses! Maybe one day I'll actually have the "over 100" Silly Bandz the box advertises. It's a fun game with some neat mechanics, I do encourage you to check it out if you like weird, niche DS games and/or Angry Birds! It's a fun little corner of video game history, and I'm really glad I got to take a look at it!


This post is a part of the series Game Reviews