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View Full Version : Ape Escape 2 review



frogbeastegg
02-16-2004, 18:03
Ape Escape 2 Sony Playstation 2 PAL version

I picked this one up cheap and played through it months ago so please forgive any slight errors.

Spoilers in this review: None.

The premise: A lot of monkeys have escaped from the zoo and have got their furry little hands on some helmets that boost their intelligence. You must use your arsenal of gadgets to find and recapture them. Platformer come puzzler with a hint of humour.

The main idea of the game is to recapture the monkeys hidden throughout the levels in a variety of cunning locations. Each monkey must be swiped with the net to count as captured, so bashing them with the stun baton or ramming them with the remote controlled car will do little more than stun them. Simply running up to the monkeys waving your net is not supposed to work, instead you are intended to use your radar to find the apes, then sneak up on them by crawling and using cover, before bagging them with the net. The monkeys range from unarmed, blind fools to deadly machine gun armed death chimps with x-ray vision. Catch a certain amount of monkeys to finish the level, some monkeys remain impossible to get until later in the game when you gain access to new gadgets to hunt them down. Sadly the idea was let down by a small handful of flaws.

Firstly stunning the monkeys does not give you enough time to get them with the net as changing gadgets is too slow. This meant you often end up chasing the monkey in some kind of imitation Benny Hill farce if you are unable to sneak up on it successfully. I found monkeys hidden in boxes or other things that you needed to break open were the worst for this. Smash box, whack chimp, swap to net, get hit by chimp halfway through the item changeover, watch as monkey runs for it while you are stunned, give chase around the level for several minutes waving the net randomly before finally catching the monkey. No tactics involved and you were punished for using your tools.

Secondly sneaking up on the monkeys was a hit and miss affair, sometimes you could crawl right up in front of them in full view, others they heard you from a mile off and made a break for freedom. Now according to the game the monkeys with better powers of observation should be the ones to spot you, but I found that was seldom the case. The weak and short sighted monkeys gave me the most trouble.

Finally when facing hostile monkeys I found the most successful approach was to simply charge in waving the net randomly. I lost less health, caught the monkey much faster, and generally had less trouble. Trying to sneak up on or decoy a monkey with a machine gun was far harder than running straight at it, zigzagging and jumping to dodge incoming fire. The monkey would stand its ground shooting at me until I got right next to it, then it would try to flee when it was too late. This reduced the game to a simple charge through each level, killing enemies with the baton and charging monkeys down with the net with no tactics, no thought, nothing but simple run and gun. The only difference between the monkeys and the standard enemies was the tool you used. By the later levels most of the monkeys weren’t even hidden any more, they were just walking up and down on patrol. This is partly down to the fact the levels parodied other games and films but where is the point in a Goldeneye parody when it is clearly unsuited to the game? It was a fantastically done set piece, instantly recognisable and very funny but it just didn’t fit. The Chinese themed level was worse – around 20 monkeys dumped in plain sight at the beginning practising their martial arts. I captured loads in a single charge at the beginning and followed the others very easily. There was no way to sneak, no use for the other gadgets, just a charge and random swiping to bag as many as possible. While seeing the monkeys punching and kicking in perfect unison in front of a temple was a memorable sight it was just a waste of good potential. A better approach would have been to trigger a cutscene as you approached the doorway into the courtyard, causing all the monkeys to run and hide. This would have allowed the set piece and kept the tone of the parody without cutting away from the object of the game.

The game uses the age old idea of having boss battles in their own separate levels. While I am not sure if boss battles are suited to the game I do have to give credit to the ingenuity present in those battles. Sure wrestling with a red monkey in a ring is nothing new but working your way on stage as a pink monkey sings her specially written and recorded pop song, and blows you exploding kisses while her groupies try to smash you is a truly unique experience The more you damaged pink monkey the more angry she got, slowly becoming dishevelled in appearance and starting to screech her song so it blew away bits of scenery. Wonderful, and the song wasn’t so bad either http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-stunned.gif Yes that’s right – a song written for a game that wasn’t utter garbage and I hate pop music Even more surprisingly this was a boss battle I enjoyed, usually I detest boss battles.

Control wise the game was very good with only two complaints from me. Firstly there just weren’t enough buttons for your gadgets so you had to interrupt the game frequently to swap out gadgets. This is more a limitation of the dualshock controller and I don’t see what could be done to reduce this except remove some of the gadgets and that would not really help. The other complaint is due to the way the game is controlled. You use the right analogue stick to aim your attacks but it is not quite sensitive enough, having only 16 or so positions in which your character can swing. I found I would often swinging and just missing because the enemy was in between the two preset directions, on a clock face I wanted to swing to halfway between the 1 and the 2 but the attack always hit at either 1 or 2. Just not accurate enough. There is nothing quite so annoying as dying or losing a monkey because your character won’t do what you want

The camera behaved quite well, better than most 3D games. There were times where I couldn’t get the angle I wanted or I was left with a useless view but I have seen many worse games. I have seen some better games as well but not so many as I may wish, 3D cameras are very hard to get right.

Graphically the game is pretty and everything is nice and clear, your life is not mad harder due to bad graphics obscuring what you are looking for or fancy effects burying what you need to see. It is not the best looking game around but it does have the occasional moment where you stop and sightsee. The characters are all well designed and distinctive, the monkeys have a lot more character than their bug eyed short wearing appearance on the box may suggest. Animation is excellent throughout, there is never any doubt as to what a monkey is doing. The animation manages to be very funny at times, in the Goldeneye level the monkeys march around with that same strut as the Russian guards on the opening dam level, chimps with guns marching like soldiers…maybe you need to see it to understand how funny it was. They have idle animations as well, wimpy monkeys sit and shiver in fear or bury their heads in their hands. Aggressive monkeys polish their weapons and do tricks with them, I saw one monkey reading a book at one point

The sound was generally of average quality. The voice acting was…typical video game voice acting, it was tolerable but not outstanding. Effort was made for the English translation, actors from the Pokemon and Noddy (you know the Enid Blyton thing, no I don’t watch it but I have suffered through the adverts on ITV) TV series were hired, so there are at least children’s TV level professionals involved. The music was not intrusive and some of it was quite catchy but I don’t remember any of it now, unlike some other games where I have remembered the music for years. Sound effects were what you would expect, monkey noises included.

One aspect of the game I feel deserves special mention is the collection of useless extras you can collect. Junk like monkey manga, screenshots, monkey fairy tales – it’s all fantastic Utterly pointless, you can totally ignore it if you wish but effort, time and care has gone into them and it shows. There are even new shells for your remote controlled car, if red racer doesn’t suit you perhaps sushi fish on a bed of rice will? The stories and manga are genuinely funny, the screenshots show off funny poses or spectacular views, the soundtracks let you listen to favourite tracks at will. ‘Apeshima Taro’, ‘the monkey who cried Hikaro’ (Hikaro is the name of your character, it’s ‘the boy who cried wolf’ with monkey overtones) and other monkey fables take familiar stories and add a monkey twist to them making them highly amusing. I ended up replaying levels to get more coins to waste on the slot machine trying to get the rest of the junk because it was somehow both addictive and rewarding, collecting Apeshima Taro part 5 so you can find out how the story ends…

I would say the game was easy and a reasonably short, I got to the last proper level (i.e. not a boss level) in a week by only playing off and on for a half hour at a time. However I did miss some monkeys and there are extra hard monkeys that appear throughout the 20+ levels after you defeat the final boss. This is not meant to be a hard game, just a fun one and at that it succeeds very well. However I did lose interest on the last proper level, it was too long, too repetitive and too dull for me to want to spend the 40ish minutes trekking through it only to fight a boss in the next level.

All in all I would say Ape Escape 2 was a good game with a lot of potential, however its few flaws were in significant areas that did damage the game. If they can be corrected in the newly announced sequel than it will be a fun and different game, the polishing off of a neat idea. Ape Escape 2 is still worth playing in my opinion if you can find it cheap, if only because it tries to be (and succeeds) different.





There you go, a sample review type thing I bunged together in an hour. Bet everyone expected me to do Thief: The Dark Project, System Shock 2, or Knights of the Old Republic – fooled you http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/tongue.gif I’ll do them later, much later when I have time to review them properly