The simplest tilt of the DualSense controller had stages careening to the left or right, sending my monkey balls flying. Playing on PS5, I even turned on motion controls to try to replicate the magic of the early Wii game Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, but that was a complete disaster. More than once, I found myself wondering why I had liked these games so much when they first came out.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania is one of the few games to offer same-system multiplayer in a time when almost everything is online-only, making party mode easily its most redeeming quality.Īs a solo experience, however, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania falls flat. Party mode has a dozen mini-games, and most of them are genuinely fun and have surprising depth when played against other humans for example, the Mario Kart-esque Monkey Race game has 12 tracks and multiple gameplay modes, and Monkey Golf has regular and mini-golf variations. Looking back at my personal experience, the Super Monkey Ball games have always been at their best as party games, and that continues to be the case with Banana Mania. There’s also the option to skip a stage entirely, which is especially nice because it ensures that you’re never stuck on one frustrating level for too long – assuming that you don’t run out of the points you need to pay your way. I can’t tell you how many times I just blindly rolled forward as quickly as possible, hoping that it would get me closer to the end, because every other strategy ended in failure.
Super monkey ball banana mania mini games list trial#
It’s usually not a matter of understanding where the end goal is - getting there through trial and error or dumb luck is the problem.
There’s a Helper mode that doubles the time limit and provides a visual path to the goal, which can be useful but usually doesn’t negate the bigger issues. It’s telling that the developers actually included a couple of ways to deal with particularly tough levels.
Super Monkey Ball could’ve learned a thing or two from Peggle about dispensing serotonin. What’s especially draining is that after finishing a particularly difficult level, there’s no satisfying adrenaline rush that accompanies overcoming a challenge - just a sense of relief that it’s finally over. The more I played past a certain point, the more it felt like a chore. If only a few levels were designed like this it’d be easier to dismiss that feeling, but after the halfway point most of them start to feel this way.Īnd while the environments and backgrounds might be fun and colorful, much of the playable level design is repetitive and uninspired. When I finally managed to land in the right place and stay put, it didn’t feel like I’d mastered the obstacles of that particular level it felt like a lucky run that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to replicate. Other attempts ended after I landed on one of the higher platforms and bounced right off again. The first time, I was thrown directly into a connecting pole and bounced off the map before I even had a chance to move. Because you can only tilt the camera up so far, I couldn’t see where the finish line was - instead, I had to roll onto a ground-level platform that thrust my ball upwards and try to figure it out in the air. That’s exactly what happened in one of the levels that made me want to pull my hair out: before me stood a towering theme park ride made up of platforms connected to a pole in the middle. 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.
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