Early levels might challenge you to make your way around a winding path or keep your momentum going long enough to clear a gap later on, you’ll be thrust into the air by spring-loaded platforms and fail the level before you even have a chance to adjust the camera to see a hazard you didn’t know would come at you from that direction.
The difficulty in Story mode really ramps up around the halfway point, going from light and breezy to a frustrating exercise in failure very quickly. The problem with both the Story and Challenge modes is that, after 30 or 40 levels, they both begin to feel like a slog. The problem is that, after 30 or 40 levels, it begins to feel like a slog. So it’s more a challenge of endurance than anything else. And of course, Challenge mode doesn’t feel significantly different from Story mode gameplay-wise because the only twist is that you can’t pick up where you left off - you have to get through all of the challenge stages in a single sitting. Challenge modes from the first two Super Monkey Ball games appear as well, although the separate modes have some startlingly similar courses. There’s the Story mode originally seen in Super Monkey Ball 2, which is less a cohesive campaign than it is about 100 levels across 10 worlds loosely stitched together with brief, dialogue-free animated cutscenes. It’s always refreshing to see games that don’t take themselves too seriously in this era of increasingly realistic graphics and serious subject matter, and Super Monkey Ball is anything but serious.īecause Banana Mania is a mash-up of several previous Super Monkey Ball games, there appears to be an almost overwhelming amount of content at first. The GameCube-era graphics have gotten an overhaul that makes the cartoony art style more vibrant than ever, and I found it hard not to bop my head to the arcadey theme music.
SUPER MONKEY BALL BANANA MANIA IGN SERIES
Sadly, rollin’ just isn’t as fun as it used to be.Īs the name implies, Super Monkey Ball is a series about monkeys in balls rolling their way through hundreds of stages and avoiding increasingly difficult obstacles – and yes, it’s exactly as silly as it sounds. I have fond memories of playing the GameCube versions with friends nearly 20 years ago, so I expected Banana Mania to be a welcome return to those carefree nights staying out past curfew and rolling down increasingly difficult courses. Unfortunately, the latter is the case with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, which compiles over 300 levels from previous Super Monkey Ball games and updates them for modern consoles. It can be a comforting sensation, but it sometimes makes things from the past seem better than they actually are.
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