Super monkey ball adventure review

Here, the residents have fallen into despair as a result of a prince and princess and it is up to the famous monkeys in their rolling balls to bring joy back to the kingdom and find the prince and princess along the way.

Traveller's Tales has perverted Sega's previously charming action puzzle series into a clumsy, frustrating action adventure game. Super Monkey Ball has proven itself to be a singularly bizarre, unique game series. You could draw some flimsy comparisons to Marble Madness, but even then you're not giving Sega credit for SMB's potent cocktail of three-dimensional puzzle-solving and harrowing platform action. Combined with its distinctly Japanese style, which was like equal parts Sonic the Hedgehog and Hello Kitty, Super Monkey Ball felt like it was developed with little concern for market forces or key demographics. It's kind of depressing, then, to watch the series degenerate into a frustrating, haphazard mush with Super Monkey Ball Adventure. It's especially disappointing on the PlayStation Portable, since it's the first Super Monkey Ball game to appear on that platform.

Super monkey ball adventure review

Super Monkey Ball Adventure altogether loses the immediately accessible nature of previous games for an uninteresting storyline that revolves around a newly implemented and equally uninteresting hub world. We learn through a series of load screens and offensively archaic in-game cut-scenes that the heroes of previous games - namely GonGon, AiAi, MeeMee and Baby - must embark upon a quest to spread joy through the five kingdoms of Monearth. The only way to do this is to travel the overworld, complete menial tasks for the inhabitants and at long last take part in some fun puzzle mazes. But things go from simple to overly complicated and indeed downright clunky when you try to stray from the body of the hub world to its many arms and legs, as each section is separated by a momentum-breaking load time. Furthermore, interacting with the monkey inhabitants of the island is a tedious undertaking due in part to the outdated animation and in part to some of the most awful, repetitive, and compressed voice samples ever devised for characters. If your tastes coincide with ours, you'll want to pull your hair out after every conversation. You will at least be able to retreat to some 50 classic-style puzzle stages, which feel and look nearly as good as their predecessors. While Traveller's Tales has mimicked these traditional challenges and even designed some clever obstacles of its own, the disappointing truth is that even these areas lack the spectacular polish of previous endeavors. Say what you will about Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2; perhaps they were not your thing. But they controlled beautifully and ran in both progressive-scan and at 60 frames per second, at least on GameCube. Neither is true of the puzzle mazes in Adventure, which, while still generally satisfying, are sometimes hampered by an inconsistent framerate and a cumbersome camera. And no, despite arriving years later, the title does not support progressive-scan. Of course, these areas are still the big draw for Monkey fans, but you have to ask yourself, why aren't they as polished as their aged predecessors? There's really no excuse. When the single-player affair grows tiresome, you can take part in a series of four-player compatible mini-games, some of which are carried over from older versions and some of which are brand new.

Hopefully Monkey Ball gets a proper new game at some point though. At the heart of previous games was a series of puzzle mazes, each designed to challenge your brain and your reflexes. And the story.

The Super Monkey Ball series has one conceit: there are these monkeys that are trapped in balls and they must very quickly get to the goal of every devilish and hatefully designed level. This takes a lot of fine-motor skills and an almost superhuman resistance to frustration. In the original games you moved the board, not the monkeys, turning the experience into something of a large-scale game of labyrinth. The titles were fun, twisted, and had some great level designs. We didn't care about the why of the game when we were having so much fun with each level, and an even better time in the multiplayer party games. The fact that they were monkeys, in balls, just added an extra bit of silliness.

Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more. Super Monkey Ball obviously seemed very appealing, and the game and sequel delivered some great skill-based puzzles and plenty of great multiplayer action. Adventure games and the new fangled adventure platformers require a few elements to achieve greatness: compelling storyline, tight controls, likable characters, variety in gameplay, and impressive production values. Being cute little monkeys that roll around inside a ball all day long, the story is about as twee as expected. You see, Super Monkey Ball built a game around carefully controlling your monkey, trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible, without falling into the never ending pit of monkey doom. With the fundamental problem with the game out of the way, Super Monkey Ball Adventure does do a few things right; namely, mixing up gameplay styles.

Super monkey ball adventure review

Trusted Reviews is supported by its audience. If you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a commission. Learn more. One thing I always liked about the Super Monkey Ball series was that the titles pretty much summed up everything you needed to know about the game. You had a monkey, in a ball. He or she rolled from the start of the level to the end of the level, collecting bananas, and the results were, generally speaking, super. This is essentially the core Super Monkey Ball mechanics broadened out for an ape-related adventure. Those old simple stages have been thrown out in favour of a series of larger, more coherent monkey worlds, and the structure is broadly identical, with various areas to be explored, characters who offer you tasks to be performed, bananas to be collected and sections to be unlocked.

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Review August 17th ianuk Some things go together so well that you should never mess with the tried and tested formula. Upvote Leave Blank. If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. The setup is appropriate enough, with the adorable Super Monkey Ball team of AiAi, MeeMee, GonGon, and Baby being called upon to investigate an enigmatic sadness that seems to be bumming out everyone in the five kingdoms on Monearth. There must have been a reason to add a story and platforming elements, but I have no clue what it is. There are still remnants of Sega's challenging action puzzle concoction left in Super Monkey Ball Adventure, but most of it has been homogenized into something that is simultaneously more accessible and less appealing. There are quite a few missions to do and extra minigames. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Of course, having to sit through cut scenes while the monkeys talk to each other in that terrible squeaky voice almost feels like I'm being punished, they basically keep repeating the different syllables in word "monkey. If you were a pro, you found ways to bounce your glass-encased monkey off objects and around turns for spectacular shortcuts. As expected, the mini-games are the highlight.

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The Super Monkey Ball series has one conceit: there are these monkeys that are trapped in balls and they must very quickly get to the goal of every devilish and hatefully designed level. This fact is rarely made explicit, so it's easy to futilely bang away at puzzles and paths that you have simply no way of overcoming. Furthermore, interacting with the monkey inhabitants of the island is a tedious undertaking due in part to the outdated animation and in part to some of the most awful, repetitive, and compressed voice samples ever devised for characters. Leave a comment Cancel reply. The story is pretty light, but the gist of it is that you must restore joy to the land of the monkeys. And if we're doing a maths metaphor, the system of loading levels behind the scenes is all very well, but the decision to have the player manually crank a rotary load system is like taking away the calculator. An idea best left on the drawing board, Super Monkey Ball Adventure attempts to meld the precision movement of the puzzle series with a 3D adventure, but fails spectacularly in the process. The graphics are okay I suppose. Load Comments 0. Play UK. There's also a suite of four-player minigames that fans will recognize, such as Monkey Fight and Monkey Target, as well as a handful of new minigames like Monkey Cannon, where each player builds a castle and then proceeds to launch monkey balls at the other castles in order to break them down and steal their building blocks. There are new puzzle levels, but I felt like I was getting very little of what I wanted and mostly paying for the terribly unfortunate single-player game. It's unfortunate that Super Monkey Ball Adventure is the sole representation of this usually delightful series on the PSP, since it takes what was great about those games and buries it under several layers of unimaginative video game convention. There's no enthusiasm - and judging by the six pages accidentally headlined "Part Games" in the manual, it wasn't just the developers who laboured over it either. Electronic Gaming Monthly.