Ape Escape Academy Review
Ape Escape Academy is a bit of a departure for the Ape Escape series. To date
all of the Ape Escape games have been platform games with a puzzle emphasis as
you worked to capture a bunch of clever little monkeys. Ape Escape Academy shows
you how these monkeys learned their escape skills in the first place, in an
academy for monkeys in which the students are forced to play seemingly endless
series of mini games. After subjecting yourself to these mini games, you’ll be
looking for a chance to escape yourself.
Ape Escape Academy collects its mini games into groups of nine that represent
one “year” of time spent at the Academy. The goal is to graduate to the next
level by winning enough mini games. The games are laid out in a three by three
grid and if you win a game its square is replaced with an “O”. Lose the game and
you’ll be given an “X” for the square. You guessed it, you’re playing
tic-tac-toe. To graduate you’ll have to win one or more rows of “O”s, and if you
don’t you’ll fail to graduate and will need to replay the year. Oddly, the game
does not let you select the square you wish to play for, instead randomly
cycling through the open squares until one is selected. Just as odd, you’ll be
forced to play all nine games regardless of whether or not you’ve already got
the required rows filled or if you’re blocked out of any chance to win. It makes
you wonder why they even bothered with the whole tic-tac-toe layer. Perhaps the
game’s developers couldn’t think of any other way to tie the mini games
together.
The lame tic-tac-toe component of the game could be totally overlooked if the
mini games were challenging and exciting, but this is not the case. The games
run the gamut from lame to odd to nearly unplayable, but never seem to be all
that much fun. All the games share the general problem of being confusing and
very short, so for many of the games you’ll find yourself losing before you can
even figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. The games that come the
closest to being enjoyable are variations of familiar games such as air hockey
and bowling while the rest are either frustrating or odd. For example, one sends
a flag flying across the screen and then asks you to identify the country the
flag is from. Another displays a simple math problem and has you select the
correct answer. Strange kinds of mini games, but at least doable. Others such as
one that has you handing roses to passing monkeys don’t even seem to work right
and are pretty much guaranteed losers for you.
In addition to the Academy mode, you can play any of the individual mini games
or compete against other gamers in wireless Ad Hoc mode, but the question is why
would you want to? The games are not very much fun as it is, so there’s little
reason to do play them any more once you’ve been through them all once or twice.
There may be a fair number of games packed into Ape Escape Academy, but quantity
does not make up for a lack of quality. None of the games are really that much
fun, so Ape Escape Academy is not that much fun itself.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
50%. You’ll want to escape the Academy yourself after playing Ape
Escape Academy for a little while.