Review of Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble – monkey in a ball

The Super Monkey Ball franchise turns 23 this week and has had over a dozen different entries in that time. And yet few would give more than the time of day to anything other than the first two GameCube entries. Sega has tried several times to expand the scope of the franchise, and after failing to reboot and remake it, they seem to have come to the inevitable conclusion that there’s only so much you can do with an in-game monkey management game. ball around the maze.

This is the first brand new entry in the series since 2012 (the recent Banana Mania was basically a remaster compilation) and it does the sensible thing to go back to basics and try to recreate the best elements of the original two games. This means you get precise skill-based maze navigation in Adventure Mode and plenty of Super Monkey Ball 2-inspired multiplayer nonsense.

They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, they’re trying to recreate it, which immediately rules out any chance of any major innovation. Only half of the formula really hits, but while that’s disappointing, it’s still a lot more than any other game has done in recent memory.

The main adventure mode for Super Monkey Ball is a very simple concept. You control a monkey trapped in a transparent sphere, moving through a huge number of small but complicated levels that work like a cross between a crazy golf course and a pachinko board.

All you’re trying to do is get to the exit at the end of the course, which generally doesn’t take more than a few minutes, but the trick is that you’re not controlling the monkey itself, but the surface it’s moving on. on. That’s less of a difference than you might think, but imagine yourself trying to control a ball rolling down a backboard as you clap your hands over it, and you get the gist.

The newer Monkey Ball games do it wrong, it’s due to over complexity and lack of precision. The first GameCube probably made better use of the GameCube’s analog stick and the little notches around its base – designed to make moving in a straight line easier than any actual Nintendo game. By comparison, modern remakes have oscillated between overly responsive and frustratingly stiff, with an equally unsettled physics engine.

The good news about Banna Rumble is that it looks much more like the original games, with fast, reliable controls and predictable physics. Although there is also a novelty in the form of rotation, which you have to turn on for a second or two and then you can aim the arrow that pops out of the sphere and shoot in the appropriate direction. It works well, but seems like an unwanted complication given how rarely it’s needed.

Overall, the level design is good, with an impressive range of gimmicks and stage design styles, from more puzzle-oriented courses to mazes, speedruns, and platform-style designs. New features are added at a steady pace, including bumpers, trampolines, gantries and other moving parts. However, for Monkey Ball veterans there’s very little challenge until at least the fourth world – although with the bonus levels unlocked by beating the initial 10 worlds, things definitely get a lot harder.

If you haven’t played any of the games before, there’s a commendable amount of help on offer, including a rewind feature and ghost data to watch if you’re not sure exactly what to do. Even without this, the bananas you collect along the way will create a racing line for the more speed-focused levels, with oddly placed bananas often indicating that a shortcut is nearby.

It doesn’t do anything fundamentally new and lacks a bit of the purity of the original focus, but Banana Rumble’s adventure mode is definitely the best since the noughties, especially when you can replay the whole thing in four-player split-screen. mode.

It wasn’t until the second game that multiplayer became an important part of Monkey Ball’s identity, which was full of silly party game-style minigames. Surprisingly, stalwarts like Monkey Flight and Monkey Target don’t look here. Equally oddly, despite the four-player adventure mode, multiplayer is limited to two-player split-screen, with other players only added as bots.

There’s still the self-explanatory Monkey Race, but the other four modes are all new and… not very good. Banana Hunt is just a race to collect the most bananas, Robot Smash has you blandly bashing toy robots, Goal Rush is a very boring slalom race, and Ba-Boom! is a bombshell hot potato game – arguably the best of the bunch, but still not very inspired.

The minigames in the older titles may not have been very elaborate, but they were fun and imaginative, and these new replacements are neither. Also, for some reason (probably because Sega seems to be trying to copy Fall Guys) these modes allow up to 16 players online. Most of the time it feels like too much, the monkeys are rolling all over the place and getting in each other’s way. No doubt it was meant to feel exciting and unpredictable, but in practice it’s just irritating and random.

The fun of multiplayer in the original was that everyone was in the same room, and that’s not enough here. It doesn’t help that the game has taken a serious framerate hit in multiplayer, which ruins the silky smooth 60fps adventure mode.

It’s a shame that Sega dropped the ball when it comes to multiplayer, because Banana Rumble is at least halfway to being the perfect modern incarnation of the series. It’s still better than the last two releases, but despite the mountains of content, including tons of cosmetics, there are large parts of the game that just aren’t very fun, and that’s bananas.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £34.99
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Release date: June 25, 2024
Age rating: 3