Ape Academy
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PSP
| Ape Academy

Everyone loves monkeys. Crazy little critters. Happiest falling out of trees, picking bugs out of the mate's hair, showing off their blue bums. Life must be great as a monkey. But if you were a monkey, we don't think you'd enjoy being sent to an Ape Academy. Sounds too much like hard work. Monkey school? No thanks. But to Ape Academy the game. Could be OK? Loads of ape-centric mini-games. Let's give it a go. And actually, to begin with it's difficult not to fall in love with its sheer enthusiasm.

As the title suggests, the game is arranged like an academy, in which you have to pass various challenges in order to graduate. Each class is led by a teacher, starting with the grumpy sergeant major-esque Red Monkey who guides you through boot camp to help you find your way around the buttons.

You then get to choose a succession of mini-games from a selection depicted on a noughts and crosses board. Succeed in the challenge and you get a nought on the board, fail and it's a cross in the particular square. Get three passes in a row and it counts towards the lines required to pass the class. It's a fairly innovative system which adds an extra level of strategy and puts additional pressure on your performance.

There are over 50 of these mini games to participate in which vary wildly from reaction tests like the 1-metre dash (you really have to go on the B of the Bang here as that's all there is), sporting challenges (like money bowling, monkey football and monkey shot put), more cerebral challenges (like the Darwin quiz, Spot the difference), and the just plain weird such as A Rose Monsieur (which sees you pedalling roses to other monkeys) and Shiskebab Special (capture vegetables and sporting goods on a sword in the right order!). While these rarely hit the heights of the best mini-games offered in the DS's excellent WarioWare Touched!, they look visually apealling and certainly aren't lacking in entertainment or innovation (the diving challenge for instance sees you turn the PSP through 90 degrees).

Regardless of the challenge it always feels like great fun - at least for the first few plays - with the simple controls, hectic pace and general sense of humour (eg watch the monkeys you didn't give parachutes to fall out of the sky in Geronimo) keeping the experience fresh and lively and ensuring that you're keen to compete but not too disappointed when you fail. Indeed, while some of the games can seem a little tough (Street Juggler, Enter the Monkey) and others a tad too random (Simian Suplex), the difficulty level on the whole seems fairly pitched with only one line of successful challenges required to compete the first three classes. Hence, the first few hours - though not entirely niggle free - are comparatively blissful.

Sooner or later however, the honeymoon period begins to fade. You'll end up looking at the umpteenth re-run of the by-now annoying monkey teacher's intro and hoping that this time enough of your favourite games will come up to help you pass. You'll have begun to notice that the variety in styles also applies to quality and fairness especially as the difficulty ramps up, with too many of the challenges feeling unfair and random. You'll be annoyed by the lack of direction offered in certain games, by not knowing how long you had left or how much further to go and more than likely will still be unsure as exactly how to win in one or two of the challenges. You might even have found yourself shouting at the screen when you've noticed that the answer to one of the quizzes just seems wrong. What's more your discontent will be compounded by the loading screens that seem to consume as much of your eyeball time as the games themselves. And then get more annoyed by the fact you can't automatically quit a class even when it's mathematically impossible for you to pass.

At this point neither the ability to compete against your high scores in a mini game-section nor the opportunity to view collected monkey figurines will comfort you. Instead you'll come up with another distraction to occupy your time and then probably won't return to Ape Academy for sometime, if at all, except perhaps when it's partytime.

For, with or without booze, Ape Escape does offer another dimension in party situations, thanks to the fact that you can play many of the mini-games multiplayer, either over an adhoc wi-fi connection or even on one PSP (with players taking hold of different ends of the machine). Naturally, with a human opponent the unfairness factor is cut-out and the spirit of competition adds a new dimension to game you might otherwise have become thoroughly bored of. But then again, what sort of ape would want to play computer games at a party?

Ape Academy is on sale now.

Ape Academy

On first play, we thought it was top banana, but eventually got tired of monkeying around
Score
Chris James
Chris James
A footy game fanatic and experienced editor of numerous computing and game titles, bossman Chris is up for anything – including running Steel Media (the madman).