Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble overview – apes in a sphere

The Super Monkey Ball franchise is 23 years old this week and has had well over a dozen different entries during that time. And yet few would give more than the time of day to anything other than the first two entries on the GameCube. Sega has tried multiple times to expand the scope of the franchise, and when that failed to reboot and remake it, but they seem to have come to the inevitable conclusion that there’s only so much you can do with a game about guiding a monkey in a ball around a maze.

This is the first brand new entry in the series since 2012 (the recent Banana Mania was essentially a remaster compilation) and it does the sensible thing of going back to basics and trying to recreate the best elements of the original two games. That means you get the precise, skill-based maze navigation of adventure mode and lots of multiplayer nonsense inspired by Super Monkey Ball 2.

It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel but recreate it, which immediately rules out the chance for any substantial innovation. It only really gets half of the formula right but while that’s disappointing, it’s still far more than any other recent game has managed.

The main adventure mode for Super Monkey Ball is a very simple concept. You control a monkey trapped in a transparent ball, moving across a huge variety of small but complicated levels, that work like a cross between a crazy golf course and a pachinko board.

All you’re trying to do is get to the exit at the end of the course, which generally doesn’t take longer than a couple of minutes, but the trick is that you’re not controlling the monkey itself but the surface it’s moving on. That makes less difference than you might think but imagine yourself trying to control a ball as it rolls about on a chopping board, that you’re titling around with your hands, and you’ve got the gist of it.

Where more recent Monkey Ball games have been getting it wrong is through over-complication and a lack of precision. The first GameCube game arguably made better use of the GameCube’s analogue stick, and the little notches around its base – designed to make moving in a straight line easier, than any actual Nintendo game. By comparison, the modern remakes have vacillated between overly sensitive and frustratingly stiff, with an equally unsettled physics engine.

The good news about Banna Rumble is that it feels a lot more like the original games, with fast, reliable controls and predictable physics. Although there’s also a new feature in the form of a spin dash, which you have to power up for a second or two and can then point an arrow, that extrudes from the ball, and shoot off in the appropriate direction. It works okay but it seems an unwanted complication, given how infrequently it’s needed.

Overall, the level design is good, with an impressive range of gimmicks and styles of stage design, from more puzzle-oriented courses to mazes, speedruns, and platform style designs. New features are added at a steady pace, including bumpers, trampolines, portals, and other moving parts. However, for Monkey Ball veterans there’s very little challenge until at least the fourth world – although things definitely get a lot tougher with the bonus levels unlocked by beating the initial 10 worlds.

If you haven’t played one of the games before then there’s a laudable amount of help on offer, include a rewind function and ghost data for you to follow, if you’re unsure what exactly you’re supposed to be doing. Even without that, the bananas you collect on the way create a racing line for the more speed-orientated levels, with oddly placed bananas often indicating a shortcut is nearby.

It does nothing substantially new, and it’s missing a little of the original’s purity of focus, but the adventure mode in Banana Rumble is definitely the best since the noughties, especially as you can once again play the whole thing in four-player split-screen mode.

Multiplayer only became an important part of Monkey Ball’s identity with the second game, which was filled with silly party game style mini-games. Surprisingly, stalwarts such as Monkey Flight and Monkey Target don’t get a look in here. Equally strangely, despite the four-player adventure mode, the multiplayer is limited to two-player split-screen, with other players only added as bots.

There’s still the self-explanatory Monkey Race but the other four modes are all new and… not very good. Banana Hunt is just a race to see who can collect the most bananas, Robot Smash has you blandly punching toy robots, Goal Rush is a very dull slalom race, and Ba-Boom! is a game of hot potato with bombs – which is probably the best of the bunch but still not very inspired.

The mini-games in the older titles might not have been very refined but they were fun and imaginative and these new replacements are neither. Plus, for some reason (probably because Sega seems to be trying to copy Fall Guys) these modes allow for up to 16 players online. This feels like far too much most of the time, with monkeys rolling about everywhere and getting in each other’s way. No doubt that was mean to seem exciting and unpredictable but in practice it’s just irritating and random.

The fun of the multiplayer in the original was everyone being in the same room and that’s just not enough of a focus here. It also doesn’t help that the game takes a severe frame rate hit in multiplayer, ruining the silky smooth 60fps appeal of adventure mode.

It’s a shame Sega has dropped the ball when it comes to multiplayer, because Banana Rumble is at least halfway to being the perfect modern incarnation of the series. It’s still better than the last two releases but despite mountains of content, including lots of cosmetics, there’s large sections of the game that just aren’t much fun, and that’s bananas.

Formats: Nintendo Switch
Price: £34.99
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Release Date: 25th June 2024
Age Rating: 3