This isn't so bad in the early levels, which are small enough that they can be completed in just a few minutes, but the later levels, which require up to ten minutes just to get to the end, can get amazingly tedious on the third trip through.įortunately the game developers realized that running through twenty levels capturing well over four hundred monkeys could easily get tiresome, so they allow the player to transform into eight different versions of their character, each one with different abilities, weapons, and methods of capturing monkeys. Unfortunately, this number is always lower than the total number of monkeys in a level, which forces players to repeat every level at least once to catch all the monkeys. Every time the player goes to one of the levels for the first time, they are told to capture a specific number of monkeys, and once they have, they automatically leave the level. This setup would be a great if there were any occasions in the game to move one way while clubbing in another, but there aren't, so all it really accomplishes is to rob the game of a desperately-needed controllable camera.Īnother problem is the game's inexplicably repetitive structure. Here the stick is mostly used for choosing which direction to swing a weapon or net in. Now, this sort of control scheme is normally only applied to 2D games, or more shooting-intensive titles, where it's vitally important to be able to fire in one direction while dodging in another. And just in case only hunting down monkeys might not carry a whole game, each level is also packed to the gills with a menagerie of killer robots.įor what's supposedly a kid's game, Ape Escape has a strangely convoluted control scheme that has the PS2's left control stick mapped to moving, while the right control stick handles multi-directional attacks. There are plenty of moving platforms to double-jump onto, and switches to hit. This is all done with standard 3D controls and puzzles. Some of the monkeys just wander around in the middle of the room, others act in their own little TV shows and movies, and some hide themselves away and need to be ferreted out. The actual game has the player running through these remarkably well-built levels searching for monkeys to bop over the head and stuff in a net. The television studio structure provides a perfect excuse for the game's levels to have an incredibly wide variety of themes, from a western level, to a medieval level, to one that's supposedly themed after The Terminator, but for some reason takes place at the docks. I've got to say, for a game solely about being cruel to animals, Ape Escape 3 is a surprisingly fun romp.Ī third-person action game, Ape Escape 3 picks up after the apes have already escaped and run rampant over a large television studio, and it's up to the player, acting as one of two precocious kids, to whack them over the head with a stun rod and then capture them with some manner of teleporting net. Apparently every now and then a nefarious monkey professor (that's a monkey professor, not a professor of monkeys) sets a whole lot of monkeys loose and it's up to a brother and sister team to viciously beat the monkeys into submission and put them back in their cages. I wasn't even sure whether the fact that the titular apes were escaping was supposed to be a good or bad thing. I was always aware that the series existed, but beyond that basic awareness, I didn't have any feelings towards it one way or the other. Interestingly, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater had a minigame in which Snake had to catch monkeys from Ape Escape.Somehow I managed to miss out on the whole Ape Escape thing. Snake has been captured by the monkeys and it is up to Pipo snake to save snake and stop the monkey Metal Gear. The game also includes three mini games, one of which is Mesal Gear were you get to play as Pipo Snake, a monkey with Solid Snake's DNA in him. Mesal Gear Mesal Gear poster showing Snake, Pipo Snake, and Pipo Ocelot. New to the series is the ability for Kei and Yumi to morph using different costumes like a knight or a ninja to gain new abilities. Unlike some platformers, Ape Escape uses the R buttons to jump. Players can have four items equipped at once, on the X, Square, Circle and Triangle face buttons. The right stick is for aiming and swinging weapons (such as the monkey net). The gameplay consists of basic platforming and capturing monkeys. The game allows the player to choose between a playable male character (Kei) and a playable female character (Yumi) at the beginning of the game. Spike, Professor, and Jimmy have been turned into mindless couch potatoes already so its up to Kei and his sister Yumi to save the world. The shows on the stations are so stupid that they turn everyone who watches them into a mindless couch potato. The evil Specter is attempting another plan to take over the world by broadcasting his own TV stations.
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