Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is the latest entry in the classic SEGA series, in which you play as a monkey inside a transparent ball, collecting bananas. You do this by tilting the stage, and rolling around like a marble, avoiding hazards and trying not to fall off.
It’s a simple design, but that simplicity is what makes the series so endearing. Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is absolutely brimming with content. It features 300 stages, taken from across the series history, and each of those stages has various optional challenges and missions available, including harder modes. It also features unlockable characters, customisable costumes and balls, a mission mode, as well as minigames. It’s a remaster of sorts of the first two monkey ball games, but does take things from other places and add in new content as well.
There are twelve minigames included, which consist of Monkey Race, Monkey Fight, Monkey Target, Monkey Billiards, Monkey Bowling, Monkey Golf, Monkey Boat, Monkey Shot, Monkey Dogfight, Monkey Soccer, Monkey Baseball and Monkey Tennis. I feel like I’ve never said monkey so much in my life. Each of these features missions and challenges in their own right, and whilst the quality of them varies, they all make for great party games.
The core of Monkey Ball has and always will be the main rolling experience, and it’s served up well here. The plethora of stages will take a lot of time to go through, and the basic gameplay mechanic is just plain fun. It’s great to ping around like a marble on these huge levels, speeding down hills or just managing to navigate over tight ledges. It just doesn’t get boring. I will say though, that the physics of the game are slightly different from the original. Whilst I didn’t have a problem adapting, I know some people have done.
In terms of the presentation, it looks good. It’s clean and sharp, and whilst these aren’t exactly top of the end visuals, they are nice and bright and do the game justice. It’s colourful and pleasant to look at, and shouldn’t be taxing on an system. The recommended graphics card is just a GTX 750 and 4GB Ram, so it’s very well optimised to run on most machines.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is the type of game that SEGA does best. Take a simple gameplay mechanic, add some bright and colourful graphics, and stick it out there. It’s the type of game they need to do more of, because it’s just so refreshing to play a game that is just pure fun. It’s so much better than Banana Blitz HD that came before it, and it’s cheaper too, it’s currently only £24.99 on Steam which I think is a steal. It’s also out on consoles too, so wherever you play, this is one I recommend.
You can check out the games official website here.
