You still roll off the ramp and use your ball as a set of wings as you glide your way towards the target but it simply doesn't feel right. The original's physics were so precise and as soon as you boot up Monkey Target in Banana Mania it's clear something is very wrong. This clearly isn't some cheap cash-in to make the most of assets lying around from Banana Blitz HD and it is undoubtedly the best Monkey Ball has been since it left GameCube, but it all comes back to the engine. This truly feels like a passion-filled celebration of Monkey Ball's 20-year legacy. We'd be surprised if anyone has love for these characters but the fact they're here is amazing.
Remember Jam & Jet? Of course you don't, they debuted in Super Monkey Ball 3D and they aren't even fully playable in their own game, just a few party games no one played because they were bad. Yan Yan & Doctor are obvious inclusions but less obvious are Beat from Jet Set Radio and Kiryu from Yakuza - what's more, they feel strangely at home rolling around in balls. The original game only had four playable characters but the base roster of Banana Mania has been tripled to 12. and that's why it hurts so much to say this isn't quite the return to form we were hoping it would be. The heart is clearly here, everything looks right. Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is here and it aims to bring everything we loved about the originals back but remade in the modern artstyle with a ton of quality of life improvements. It's been 19 years since Super Monkey Ball 2 and we've gone on to finish every release out of admiration for what we loved in the past, even though we've had bad experiences with most of them, but the future has never looked so promising. This also extends to the party games which may seem like completely different experiences but whether you're playing Billiards or flying through the sky in Monkey Target, the importance of physics and momentum is still at the forefront of the experience. Check out a few speed runs if you haven't before, the things people can do in these games is bananas. The meta of Monkey Ball is exploiting the stages - moving the Monkey in ways the developer likely never even intended. Everything worked exactly as you'd expect on GameCube, so much so that finishing the game in a linear fashion is more like the tutorial. How is such a simple idea repeatedly executed so poorly? It all comes down to the engine.
0 kommentar(er)
