Review | Manic Monkey Mayhem

Format: Wii | Genre: Action | Publisher: The Code Monkeys | Developer: The Code Monkeys | Release Date: 06/11/09 | RRP: 1000NP (£7.00)

By Mike Mason

In reality, I can’t stand monkeys. There’s just something about them that doesn’t sit well. Is it the flea picking and eating, the toothy grins, or simply the eerie similarities they bear to our own species? Probably the latter. Games, though, are something else all together. The flying monkey that is half of the namesake of Zack and Wiki? Love it. Maraca monkey Samba? Life of the party. Monkey Island? Best thing ever.

So when Manic Monkey Mayhem swung its oversized arms onto WiiWare, it only seemed right that I should play it. Who can resist the hilarious screeches of a gaming gibbon? Developers The Code Monkeys, judging by their name, have the same idea. Their debut WiiWare title is a multiplayer-focused excursion into a land where chimps launch bananas at each other to evacuate platforms that reach precariously skyward from a variety of settings, from your typical jungle habitat to volcanic rocks, freezing ice lands and even outer space.

You perch atop a platform and assault other monkeys by chucking fruit at them by holding A, whipping the remote and then releasing A. Connect your shots and take down their life meter and down they fall. After-touch can be applied with the D-pad to give your projectile a swerve – essential, given that the opponent will be dodging about to avoid contact. Dodging is a skill you have at your disposal too, also with the D-pad (or the Balance Board, which works equally well and makes things even easier, leaving the D-pad exclusively for after-touch), though if that fails a well-timed push of A can catch objects and add them to your own stockpile of ammo. Better yet, aim the pointer at another platform – the same method used to put simian targets in your sights – and tap B to skip right to it.

//Bananarama
Manic Monkey Mayhem looks great from a first glance. The presentation is clean, with nice touches such as clickable bananas scrolling around in the background – fun to have a piddle around with while waiting for other players to set their options. There’s only a limited amount of writing, the game being without any story whatsoever, but what is there to describe characters and the like is humorous.

There’s a bunch of game modes to keep you busy too. Single-player offers up a mission-based campaign with a mandatory tutorial to teach you the ancient art of fruit-throwing. Then there are three campaigns comprising a grab-bag of game types, each of which correspond to a difficulty level. The harder campaigns switch out bananas for more vicious foods like coconuts that deal more damage, thus making things much less lenient. Other game types outside of the campaign are Greatest Ape, a last-monkey-standing affair; Minute Monkey for those timed score battle moments; and Ape Team, which is sort of like a team deathmatch, except with monkeys on poles.

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