Still, learning a stage and achieving mastery of it often requires a substantial amount of trial and error, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea.įortunately, Banana Mania doesn’t really punish you for falling off a stage, so I also never felt like I was losing any progress. Characters respond how you expect them to (unless you’re using motion controls), and whether I was speeding through levels or falling off the stage every thirty seconds, it always felt like my own doing – a good sign of a balanced game. Fortunately, the physics that drive Banana Mania’s gameplay are dependable and feel great. Some levels do have secret switches you can hit to, slay, slow down a fast-moving obstacle to make your life easier, but more often than not, the line between success and failure is simply a thin one you need to balance on (literally). Maybe it’s my own lack of finesse, I experienced plenty of stages during my playthrough that were immensely tricky, even just a few worlds into the game. I was surprised, actually, at just how challenging some of these stages could get. That said, the main objective is simply to reach the goal before the timer runs out – which is often enough of a challenge by itself! Points can be redeemed in Banana Mania’s in-game store for new modes, characters, and costumes, so they are worth collecting. Collecting bananas isn’t essential to clear any level, doing so contributes to you overall point tally. You generally have 60 seconds to get to the end of a stage, each one littered with bananas to collect that are often located in precarious places. Stages in the main game start out as simple, flat surfaces, but quickly ramp up to being filled with an obscene number of hazards to avoid, from holes you can fall through to platforms that will launch you off the stage. That’s pretty much all there is to it, yet it’s because of that simple premise that Super Monkey Ball can deliver tightly designed stages that consistently find creative ways to keep players on their toes. It’s mechanically simple, too – tilt the stage, and the monkey rolls in that direction. Surprise: you control a monkey in a ball! And if monkeys in balls are good at anything, that thing appears to be rolling along a stage (or more often in my case: off the edge of it) to a goal within the time limit, collecting as many bananas along the way as possible. Ostensibly, the Super Monkey Ball games have always been remarkably simple from a mechanical standpoint. There are costumes and characters to unlock, online leaderboards and even a photo mode! Banana Mania is by far the biggest Super Monkey Ball game to date in terms of sheer content, so fresh players and returning fans alike will have plenty to experience. There are brand new challenge modes, and built-in secondary objectives for every stage and mode in the game. There are twelve party games included for local multiplayer up to four players, all of which can also be played solo. There are over three hundred stages present from Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and Deluxe included in Banana Mania, all brought into the modern era with new models, textures and lighting. And when I say generous, I mean REALLY generous. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania may not be the entirely new release that fans of the franchise have been waiting almost a decade for, but it’s perhaps the next best thing: a generous package of stages, mini games and modes from the first three games in the series.
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