For the past week, I’ve been catching up with an old friend every night. Super Monkey Ball and I were inseparable back in the GameCube days, but we drifted apart when the series abandoned its clever challenges and finely tuned physics in favor of bland level design and precise motion controls that were priced out of the casual gamer. So you can imagine my indifference when I saw that Super Monkey Ball Bananas Rush was initially announced with a focus on the out-of-control chaos of 16-player online battles.
But I was delighted to be proven wrong. Bananas Rush contains the best traditional level design of the Super Monkey Ball series since the GameCube original, coupled with a precise control mechanic that gives me complete control over my direction to overcome the difficult obstacles in the late game. The Monkey Ball I remembered is finally back, and now I just want to roll around.
Bananas Rush features two hundred new levels in twenty cartoon-style worlds, each containing ten stages. In traditional Super Monkey Ball fashion, the mechanics are fairly straightforward: you have sixty seconds to roll your monkey from the start to the end, but the obstacles you encounter before you reach the end change dramatically as you progress through the adventure. Bananas Rush doesn’t present much of a challenge in its early stages, meant to familiarize you with the mechanics so you can slowly get up to speed as the difficulty gradually increases.
As an undisputed Super Monkey Ball 2 expert, I had no problems playing through the first eighty levels. Still, I had a great experience as I had to deal with curves, ramps, rails, switches, and ejections that reminded me of the excellent level design of the original Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble Screenshots
Speedrunning is also a classic mechanic from the original game, and it’s fun to watch yourself zip through less precise levels, feeling like you knew exactly how to achieve your current goal from the start. I quickly realized that Banana Rumble was a return to the series’ roots, and had the best time listening to the game’s beautiful GameCube-inspired soundtrack in its early stages.
This lighthearted atmosphere doesn’t last long, however, as Banana Rumble’s difficulty ramps up in the latter stages. After completing all of Adventure Mode’s challenges, you’ll unlock ten EX World levels, and then the action shifts to more difficult challenges that will test my monkey’s mettle in every way possible, from exaggerated spinning contraptions to invisible tilted seesaws to narrow passages that require you to tiptoe to get through, Banana Rumble constantly introduces new challenges and cleverly reimagines old ones.
I tried and retried some of the final levels dozens of times, and the feeling of accomplishment when my monkey Ai Ai finally broke through some elusive goal was unparalleled. In fact, I was so focused on completing every challenge that Banana Smash offered that one night, even as the sky was fading, I was too lazy to get up and turn on the lights, so I just sat in the dark and played with my monkey ball until late at night. I think it was time well spent.
Organization in chaos
Great scene design and diverse elements need to complement the gameplay, otherwise it will become meaningless, and Super Monkey Ball does this for the first time in decades. Although at first glance it seems that you are just moving your ball car through each course, the core design of Super Monkey Ball is the control of the scene, not the little monkey. The design has been greatly improved, and the joystick operation will perfectly adapt to the angle of the platform, allowing you to precisely control how the terrain tilts, which in turn affects which direction your little monkey rolls.
2021’s Taste of the Game (a remake of all the levels from Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and Deluxe) should have been a game-changer, as it recreated some of the best levels in the series’ history, but its controls were so sluggish and imprecise that even the easier levels were frustrating, and the harder ones were demotivating. Precise controls are essential for those tough challenges, and Bananas has them so smoothly that every time I fell off the edge, I almost always felt it was my fault and promised to do better next time.
Bananas also offers a wealth of control options for the scene and camera, and I maxed out every setting I could find and got an expert feel for it. The physics aren’t perfect (sometimes I didn’t get the bounce I expected when jumping from a high platform), but this is still the best Super Monkey Ball game since the first and second games.
Banana Rush finally abandons the series’s historically poor jumping mechanic (after all, my monkeys are trapped in a ball, so they shouldn’t be able to jump even if I tilt the platform, right?) and replaces it with a thrilling new move called the Spin Dash, which borrows from Sonic the Hedgehog and lets you unleash explosive speed after charging up.
Jumping isn’t usually practical in previous games, but the Spin Dash is a brilliant refinement of Super Monkey Ball’s core mechanic. While only a few levels force you to use the Spin Dash, there are shortcuts in almost every scene, and those shortcuts are usually only possible with the help of the Spin Dash.
The Spin Dash can catapult your poor little monkey to the other side of the map in the blink of an eye if you aim well, and for speedrunners, figuring out all the shortcuts and making the most of this clever mechanic is the goal. Bananas Rush rewards those who understand the game’s mechanics and level design, and adds a lot of replay value by providing alternative routes hidden from view that usually require expert players to reach.
Multiplayer on One Screen
Adventure mode adds multiplayer, which was sadly missing from the original two games. You can tackle all 200 levels with up to three other players in local multiplayer split-screen or online co-op. The online play experience is so smooth that I played through the entire adventure mode online with a friend and never lost connection. Bananas Rush also runs smoothly at 60 frames per second on the Nintendo Switch, and it maintains the same performance even when online players join in. When playing split-screen, the frame rate is slightly affected, but not to the point of being unplayable.
Teaming up with other players turns Banana Rush into a surprisingly strategic cooperative experience. Everyone starts the game at the same time, but as long as one player reaches the goal, the whole group can move on. This also makes the optional mission objectives of each level easier to achieve. Each level requires players to collect a certain number of bananas, complete the game within a certain time, and find a hidden golden banana, which usually requires superb skills to obtain. Having one person reach the end as quickly as possible while the others collect bananas separately can add a more interesting strategic element to the entire game experience.
I even had fun playing randomly matched online games, as I was able to help new Super Monkey Ball players through some of the easier levels and work with others to get some of the trickier golden bananas in the later difficult levels, and then cheer my teammates on with encouraging emoticons and phrases. I just wish BananaBlast had a more traditional “challenge mode” that allowed players to try and complete the levels at their own pace.
One problem with the online multiplayer is that it kicks everyone out of the game after they finish a world, so we had to share a new lobby code with our friends every time we wanted to continue. In addition, the game does not show you the plot of the adventure mode when you play it online, which means that if you want to know what happened to Ai Ai, Mimi, Baby, Guang Guang, and their new friend Parete, you can only play it locally or watch all the cutscenes after the game is over.
I don’t play Super Monkey Ball for the plot (after all, the plot of the series is very simple and straightforward), so I don’t have a problem with not showing the cutscenes because it allows everyone to play quickly, but I still feel a little strange about the omission.
The area where BananaBlast needs improvement the most is its battle mode. Veterans of Super Monkey Ball will know how classic party games like Flying Monkey Jump and Monkey Bowling are, but there’s little in the way of competitive gameplay that held my attention for more than a few minutes, and the five modes are so basic and uninspired, and there are so few rotating maps that I felt like I had already explored them all in less than an hour. There are race modes, banana collectors, and bomb crises, but they feel like a poor imitation of the competitive mode in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
I’m sure other players feel the same way, because it took me several minutes to match a full 16-player game just a few days after the game was released. Performance in competitive mode is also greatly reduced, and it occasionally freezes into a slide show when it is in competitive mode, which is supposed to be a stable 60 frames in adventure mode. Local online functions are also limited, because you can’t play competitive mode with two other people on the same machine, let alone three or four people.
But even if you completely ignore Banana Mayhem’s half-baked battle modes, there’s plenty to keep you busy. I’ve beaten all 200 levels, but I’m still a ways from completing all the level objectives. Some of the level objectives left me scratching my head as I kept wondering how on earth I was going to get all the dozens of bananas and get to the end in time.
Players can also purchase hundreds of cosmetic items with in-game credits. I’m a simple person, so I bought the classic orange T-shirt I loved in the original game and felt satisfied with it, but considering that Banana Mayhem has a total of 12 playable characters (and if you have the SEGA Pass, you can also add Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends to the lineup), the equipment and accessories options are really dazzling.
Conclusion
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mayhem takes the series back to its roots in a grand manner. The series has finally found its way home, with two hundred cleverly designed levels that offer both a relaxing and enjoyable experience and an extremely hardcore challenge, and with rigorous mechanics and physics feedback that allow me to fully control the fate of the little monkey in my hand. This game is not limited to the reproduction of the classic gameplay of “Super Monkey Ball”, because the newly added “spin sprint” action has become a wonderful optimization of the core gameplay of this series. In addition, the appropriate online function has further given it a strategic nature.
Although the boring battle mode is the most disappointing part of the entire game, the large number of optional objectives and replayability in the adventure mode are enough to easily make up for this shortcoming. Although “Banana Fight” does not reach the heights of the GameCube original, it is undoubtedly the best “Super Monkey Ball” game in more than 20 years.