Ape Escape Academy (PSP)

A minigame collection probably seems like a safe bet design-wise. Put together a selection of quick and simple activities and even if a few are stinkers, there will likely be enough games of interest present to leave players walking away thinking they had a good time. Creativity and variety are important though when banking on this type of game design, and Ape Escape Academy feels like it had very little thought put into many of its minigames, turning a seemingly safe bet into a rather messy experience.

 

Ape Escape Academy, also known as just Ape Academy, is part of the broader Ape Escape series where monkeys with intelligence increasing helmets run amok. Under the guidance of a particularly intelligent white monkey named Specter, the apes mostly seem happy to mess around, but in Ape Escape Academy, Specter wants to have his forces shape up to pose an actual threat. Putting together a training program, Specter appoints five more advanced apes to head the classes, the player needing to clear all of them to attempt a final battle minigame to prove your might. The five hosts are colorful characters carried over from Ape Escape 2, meaning you have the jovial and flirty Ukki Yellow, the preppy but scary when angered Ukki Pink, and Ukki Red’s mix of superhero and drill instructor to make their brief comments between minigames a bit flavorful. Rarely do they actually get involved in the games, Ukki Red hosting two of them himself an anomaly but it seems to be more as a way of easing the player in with games they likely won’t revisit.

The way the classes are structured involves a bingo card with somewhat random games appearing in the nine slots. Each turn spots will be highlighted rapidly and you can try and stop on your preferred game, each class having a specific amount of Bingos you have to earn to clear the class. They are all very kind though, you only need 3 rows for the hardest one and Bingos can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. There are three hidden Specter coins attached to certain minigames you can just barely get a glimpse at when the class starts though, a special more involved game unlocked if you can get all three to encourage you to take more games seriously, although having a little wiggle room to lose is at least a nice way to handle some of Ape Escape Academy’s issues with minigame design.

 

Ape Escape Academy offers 47 minigames in total, and when it’s time to play one, you’ll usually get a quick description of the controls and a description of the broader goal. Many times though the game can leave you scratching your head what it’s trying to describe or it might even leave out some vital information, leading to your initial time spent with a minigame likely ending with failure as you try to grasp it. Enter the Monkey: Earth for example has you leaping off walls in a shaft that’s slowly closing in on you, a loss immediate if you’re squashed and the timer seemingly designed around the fact that you will need to figure out the jumping rhythm to get the much larger leaps. This mechanic isn’t hinted at so it’s just something you will potentially discover with luck. Other times you’ll have something like Enter the Monkey: Man that starts off about finding a single monkey but that monkey uses unexplained techniques that hide itself so you don’t even know what you’re searching for exactly before you’re asked to find it. Simian Suplex sounds a little baffling when introduced as you can only defeat the opponent with a left hook, but then the boxing match involves running around automatically and you must struggle to command your monkey to move where you want to actually pull off the attack. Simian Suplex’s disorientation lasts after understanding due to its deliberately unresponsive controls, but if both sides get a hang of it then it can stagnate as neither is going to allow themselves to get hit.

The sad thing though is even in the games explained properly, there are a fair few duds and repeated ideas. A lot of the games have instant failure states or can be over surprisingly quickly. The 1.00 Meter Dash is just a sudden button tapping competition that ends too quickly to really enjoy, and while some games are longer on higher difficulties or in single score-focused play, you also have things like Super Skewer were stabbing the indicated fruits as they fly in remains a bit too easy and more a waiting game than anything. Games with some more substance like Banana Guardian aren’t much better though, this minigame seeming to crop up fairly often but not getting much better as it gets harder. Your need to defend a banana on a campfire as zombie-like monkeys try to come claim it, but they’ll sometimes hit the deck to avoid your slingshot. If you have a boomerang you can still hit them, but otherwise all you can do is wait for them to get up, the game sometimes not sending many monkeys out at a time so you’re just waiting or worse, it sends some in too quickly and managing them well doesn’t seem feasible before a quick end.

 

Ape Escape Academy also repeats a few ideas far too often. The game pads its ranks with 10 trivia games, 5 of them math based and 5 more general knowledge. The math based ones don’t get too difficult, but others will ask you to identify world flags with odd choices like Cambodia feeling unusually specific. You are given a little room for failure in the trivia games at least, something that also applies to the 4 dance games where you need to hit the right inputs in time with the music. The rhythm games can have a few moments where it gets a little faster to possibly lead to failure but otherwise they are easily surmounted and means Ape Escape Academy’s true minigame count feels much smaller since the Bingo boards won’t repeat games in the same classification nor will they include the special Specter coin games.

 

There are some minigames that feel better conceived or unique. For every game like Monkey Watching where you count every ape that passes by in a minigame format found in a fair few other collections, you have something like Mon Quixote where you rotate your shield to block incoming arrows or A Rose, Monsieur? where you need to hold a rose towards passing apes to wear them down into actually taking it. Many minigames can be played with other human players so something like a basic bit of air hockey can be appreciated a bit more with a friend and the boss games are usually winners either on their own or in multiplayer. Monkey Dice has both players roll a dice and then either hit or defend once they see if their die is higher or lower, this a bit too easy against the game opponent but a human pair of players can make it more competitive. The game does try to design itself so multiple people can play it with one system to dubious results thanks the PSP’s button placement, so you’d likely want everyone to have their own system. In terms of solo longevity though, there are also ape figurines you can sometimes collect during minigames but they are so rare and yet so numerous that a complete collection feels like it would be a thankless and overly long process considering those figurines seem ported in from a main Ape Escape game with no consideration for their now out-of-context quotes making any sense.

THE VERDICT: Like many minigame collections, Ape Escape Academy has some games that work and some that don’t. Unfortunately, the scale tips against it even after you get past the sometimes poor rule explanations. Beyond just repeating ideas, Ape Escape Academy also leans on a few too many games that are deliberately not the best to control as part of their challenge, and while there are some safe and simple ideas to make up a mediocre core, the truly good ideas often don’t get much room to thrive or are cordoned off as boss games or single-player only trials. Add in a fairly easy Bingo approach to solo play but with an unenthusiastic figure collection angle stapled onto it, and Ape Escape Academy really feels like it only deserves a spot in the cheapest of bargain bins.

 

And so, I give Ape Escape Academy for PlayStation Portable…

A BAD rating. If Ape Escape Academy ends up in your possession somehow, there will be some moments of enjoyment to be had. A few minigames work pretty well, and trying to set a new record in Mon Quixote works because its design is suitable for longer play despite its simplicity. The Bingo cards in the academy portions will probably throw in a few of the interesting ones, but you’ll also likely end up with some that feel annoying to control like Simian Suplex, feel too easy like the tepid dodgeball of Monkey Dodge, or are over too quick like the 1.00 Meter Dash. Padding things with repeats feels outright deceptive when games could have simply used different difficulties to swap around the dances or trivia, but the games with a little room for failure often end up better than ones that can take a few attempts to properly get to grips with. The biggest issue remains that Ape Escape Academy just doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to think up enjoyable minigames. Simian Suplex doesn’t need to be bad, but it’s less than responsive controls and constant movement mean it can drag on as positioning yourself well is too easily avoided by the opponent. An idea like Banana Guardian isn’t bad on the surface, but the reliance on making the monkeys impervious to normal attacks for a time slows down a game that needed more life. At least a practice mode could let some games like the balancing act of Bridgeway to Bananas be figured out properly instead of failed until you actually understand what the sparse instructions are asking of you, but beyond the fun voice acting for the academy hosts, it feels like not too much attention was given to any one part of Ape Escape Academy.

 

The silly and strange monkeys of the Ape Escape series do feel like they’d be a strong fit for more casual party games and Ape Escape Academy is only one of many games to put them in that context, but it feels like it was done with little passion. Few of the games seem to tap into anything beyond standard minigame designs, and while you have a few boss games parodying other PlayStation titles, it does feel like the monkeys could be swapped out with almost any other set of characters with little lost. They didn’t necessarily need to be catered to the characters, but that does seem to further suggest that this game wasn’t made because of interesting ideas but rather as a way to tap a popular enough series for something that wouldn’t require too much thought. While minigame collections may not need to do as much as full-fledged adventures to be liked, they can’t just settle on being too basic either or else they’ll have no hope of standing out in a market where many other game creators can just as easily provide something similar.