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Ape Academy
This
was a tough one. With the machine being very new in this country it’s
still easy to get caught up in most games for the PSP and give them all
sorts of outlandish scores. I think with the excitement over the new
machine and it’s fantastic format that there is a tendency in some cases
to forgive a game its failings, however I had to get over the excitement
of this being a launch title and note that it simply is not the solid
gameplay experience that I was really hoping it would be.
Ape
Academy is not what fans of the Ape Escape series would have been hoping
for based on assumptions from the previous titles in the series. The
madcap chase sequences and other little bits and piece that made the
game so much fun are not here. You are simply a monkey playing a series
of mini games that are not very well set up.
This
is where we started picking bones with this game; progression is made
through a series of hubs where you will meet another chimp that will
lead you to play another lot of games. It does get pretty repetitive and
you lose a bit of the flow for each game with it’s loading time and
cumbersome method of the player choosing the next game that they wish to
play.
Graphically the game is nice enough to look at although fairly
simplistic. The title runs fairly smoothly on the unit but there must
not be enough that they’ve looked into with regards to the general
interface of the game which could do with some tweaking. Voice acting
for the title is sufficient for what it has to do and music is standard
fair.
For
those of you who don’t mind the load times and awkwardness of the hub
system, this will be a neat piece of fun. For the rest of you it will be
neat fun that you won’t play more than once. Rent first and buy later.
This
game allows for wireless gameplay against three other players.
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