For once, the monkeys aren't the ones flinging the poop. The first appearance of Ape Escape on the PSP wasn't exactly well-received either, so expectations were somewhat high for the follow-up, Ape Escape Academy. Unfortunately, Sony's zany action puzzler failed to impress the majority of reviewers, some of whom complained of the game's short lifespan and aggravating load times.We like monkeys, but maybe not at full price. Here's a rundown of the reviews:
GameSpot [6.1] - Despite an abundance of monkeys in funny clothes--a very compelling element indeed--Ape Escape Academy comes off as rather generic. The Ape Escape games have consistently done a good job of supplanting genre conventions and injecting the action with a bizarre sense of humor, but Ape Escape Academy ignores almost all of these tenets.
IGN [5.5] - Ape Escape Academy suffers from a number of issues, namely sluggish control and poor design. While there's a decent number of games to choose from, very few of them will strike you as memorable or worthy of addiction. And the multiplayer modes, while not terrible, feel very limited in scope.
Eurogamer [4.0] - Bad news for Sony: the mini-games are mostly rubbish or badly made, the loading times are atrocious, and apart from issues of quality, design and technical competency, we're also bothered by the need to reset the game every time you want to do as the Apes and "escape" the current game mode. We're not crazy about the ambiguous instructions either.
1. Another PSP dig by our friends here at DS... er, PSPFanboy, not to be confused with real PSP fans.
Let's have another pic of a bashed PSP, article about the DS outselling it, buggy firmware or another crappy game highlighted. Wonderful.
Posted at 3:25PM on Jan 25th 2006 by pixelator 0 stars