Ape Escape 3

After a brief cameo in the most recent Metal Gear Solid, the monkeys get back to their usual japes.

When the first Ape Escape game made its appearance on the original PlayStation in 1999, the Dual Shock controller was new and the game became sort of a fun tech demo to show what the controller could do. Now, almost seven years later, most gamers are more than familiar with the ubiquitous Dual Shock controller and Ape Escape 3 is still using it in about the same way. This is not to say that the game is bad, it just fails to innovate significantly and the fun is just a little bit staler this time around.

In Ape Escape 3 the evil-genius monkey Specter has again brought a hoard of monkeys under his control. And now, with the help of a turncoat human scientist named Dr. Tomoki, Specter plans to take over the world for monkeykind. Naturally, since these are monkeys, they can’t do it in the same old, non-funny ways like stealing a nuclear weapon or developing an anti-human virus. No, the monkeys are going to do it by stealing the airways and broadcasting made-by-monkey programs so silly that they will turn the entire human population into drooling couch potatoes. (Kind of sounds like what reality TV is already doing to the population.) But the plan has been found out and humankind dispatches its greatest remaining champions to do battle with the malevolent marmosets. Unfortunately for humankind, the remaining champions consist of a couple of elementary school kids named Kei and Yumi. But they swing a mean net and, with their Aunt Aki for backup and gadget wrangling, they are off to capture all the ghastly gibbons.

Ape Escape 3 is a game for only one player, so the first decision of the game is to choose between the twins Kei and Yumi. Conveniently for younger players with strong feelings about playing with an avatar that does not reflect their own sex, Kei is a boy and Yumi is a girl. Once your character is chosen, you head out to kick some monkey butt. You’ll be aided in your simian snagging by a selection of gadgets you’ll earn along the way. You start with a stun bat for taking out robotic enemies and whacking the monkeys and a net to actually capture the monkeys you whack. Later you’ll add more gadgets that will not only increase your capturing efficiency, but also help you in locating the monkeys.

As with the original Ape Escape, the dual sticks do the gorilla’s share of the work in controlling Ape Escape 3. The left stick moves the player’s avatar around the 3-D environment. The right stick swings nets, rotates monkey-finding radar dishes, wields bats and generally manipulates all the gadgets you’ll use. The face buttons are relegated to quick-select buttons for gadgets mapped to them and interacting with the environment and selecting from menus. The R1 and R2 buttons individually control jumps. Pushed together they initiate a Morph Jump, one of the truly new innovations in this game. A morph jump lets the player don a costume and take on new abilities like a knight, ninja or cowboy.

Rounding out the significant controls is the L1 button. The L1 button is significant since it is the only real camera control. It re-centers the camera when it has wandered too far from behind you and you once again can’t see where you are going or have lost a fleeing monkey in a tight turn. Sadly, the camera has enough problems that you and the L1 button will become intimate friends after only a few levels.

Each level of the game has the player capturing a set number of monkeys. Once the required number of monkeys are captured, you warp back home and can move on to the next mission. The thing is if you want to get all the monkeys on a level, you have to return to it. I think I see the logic in having more monkeys on a level than are required to bag so you aren’t stuck for an hour tracking down that last hiding howler, but it would have been nice to have a way to ask the player if he wanted to keep exploring the level to get all the monkeys or move on when he has the minimum required. As it is, the player has no such choice. Of course interspersed between the levels are boss fights with the Freaky Monkey Five. (Do I still have their record from the 1960s?) These bosses don’t offer great challenges, other than some problems with the camera angle, but do break up the action and give you some nice opportunities to use the morph powers.

Graphically the game is not really up to the standards you’d expect from a first-party game more than five years into the PS2’s life cycle. The visuals are generally pretty bland. The audio is also only so-so. Nothing you’ll be remembering once the game is over.

What the game did get right is the humor you would expect to encounter when monkeys run amuck. The TV and movie theme of the game opens up parody possibilities for everything from Friday the 13th movies to Indiana Jones and spaghetti westerns. Most of these parodies work pretty well, and a grin will often be on your mug as you watch the monkey’s go through their antics.

So, Ape Escape 3 is still a solid, fun game and fans of the series are probably going to enjoy this installment too. On the downside we have a game that has not seen much innovation, is not that aesthetically attractive and has fairly annoying camera problems. In the end I have to go with the solid and fun gameplay and rate this game a little above average. The "B-" score should be seen as a message that the game is still good, but it may be time to give the franchise a much-needed major overhaul.

This review courtesy of our friends at Gameshark .