APE ESCAPE
PlayStation review

Monkeys are cool. There is no doubt that the modern icon for the irreverent and humorous is the monkey, they have funny faces, they make funny noises, they act something like humans and the swing around in a laid-back and carefree way. Everyone wants to have a monkey.

Given this, any game featuring a monkey is instantly given a cool status, and there more monkeys the better. With that in mind, Ape Escape is the coolest game ever made, not only for it's title, but it is chock full of monkeys…wearing pants…with flashing lights on their heads, even on occasion firing machine guns. Now how much more do you want from a game?

Don't worry about this being a superficial monkey related product; Ape Escape (despite the incorrect title) is one of the finest, most playable platform games ever released on the playstation. And it has monkeys in it.

You play Spike, a small spiky red haired boy with a cool bowling shirt who looks like he takes hair tips from Orgy. Like most Japanese adventures, Spike has a professor friend (looking something like the Professor from the cartoon 'Wowser'). The Professor, with his young girl assistant, has created a special mind control unit that is worn as a hat. However, a very clever, but inherently evil monkey by the name of Spectre has stolen the unit and used it to control all of the monkeys in the zoo, hence the flashing lights on their heads. Now all of the monkeys have escaped and run amok.

During their tyrannical rampage they infiltrated the professors lab and made fine use of another of his inventions, a time machine. Now the monkeys are scattered throughout time, no doubt causing all sorts of trouble the way rampaging monkeys would.

As Spike, it is your job to travel though time trying your best to capture all of the monkeys and send them back to the present, and what better way to do this than with an overly large butterfly net. Yes that's right, you chase after monkeys with a net. The net is a special 'time-net' and bagging a monkey will send him hurtling back to the present day.

The starting levels of this 3D platformer start of fairly small leaving you wondering if the game isn't going to be just a little too easy. However, as you progress the levels really start to open up making the challenge of monkey capture ever more taxing.

Some of the little monkeys have also managed to get themselves into very hard to reach places, so hard to reach in fact that your double jumping abilities and net alone are not enough to obtain said monkey. So along your journey the professor will introduce you to new inventions to aid you in your quest. These range from a monkey-radar (don't we all want one of these), hand propeller and dash-hoop to an underwater net and a remote control car.

The game can only be played using the analogue dual shock controller, but it works very well. The left stick is used for movement and the right stick for swinging or operating the different inventions. The buttons are then used for quickly selecting each invention and the d-pad for moving the camera. For a simple looking platform game the controls can appear quite complicated at first, but they soon become easy to get to grips with.

The change of controls for certain objects within the game also deserves a mention. At some points you will need to cross water in a small yellow inflatable boat. At this point the left stick controls the left oar and the right stick the right oar. Rotating each stick rotates the oars giving very realistic control over an apparently cartoon looking boat.

Just like good DVDs there are bonus features too, including the monkey data library, giving personal information about each and every monkey you capture. There are also several sub-games, which are accessed once you collect a certain amount of tokens within the game. These games include such delights as downhill skiing and monkey boxing, which is reason enough to buy the game.

Ape Escape is a huge game, which should take up most of your time. The cuteness of the monkeys soon wears off however, especially when you have difficulty catching a certain monkey wielding a rocket launcher. The graphics aren't amazing, but then again this was made a few years ago and when the gameplay is this good graphics really do come second.

The only annoying thing about the game in fact is the quite awful English voice dubbing during the cut scenes and intro. It makes a change having English voices in a game like this, but listening to it then makes you realise why it's not common.

If you like monkeys, cute Japanese cartoon characters, platform games, time travel and highly playable video games then you cannot go wrong with Ape Escape. It is one of the most under-rated games ever which is a plus point as you can now get it quite cheap.

9/10

david twomey

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