Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble review


Last week I spent every evening visiting a dear old friend. Super Monkey Ball and I were inseparable back in the GameCube days, but we drifted apart when the series swapped its perfect blend of devilish challenges and finely-tuned physics for bland level design and erratic motion controls for a more casual audience – so you can imagine my indifference when the initial announcement of Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble focused so much on the uncontrolled chaos of its 16-player online battles. But I've never been happier to be proven wrong, because inside Banana Rumble hides the finest set of traditional Super Monkey Ball levels the series has seen since the GameCube original, backed by tight mechanics that give me the full control I need to overcome its tough late-game obstacles. Monkey Ball is finally back, and now I just want to roll.

Banana Rumble's impressive set of 200 courses is divided into 20 cartoony worlds, each with 10 stages. In classic Monkey Ball fashion, the setup is extremely simple: you have 60 seconds to roll your monkey from start to goal, but the obstacles between those points change radically throughout the adventure. The early stages aren't too challenging, thoroughly familiarizing you with Banana Rumble's mechanics so you'll be ready when it heats up.

As a certified master of Super Monkey Ball 2, I had no trouble getting through the first 80 levels. But it was still fun to get through them, as I had to deal with curves, ramps, rails, switches, and bumps that were reminiscent of the level design seen in the excellent Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2. Plus, speedrunning is a classic element of the original, and it was a lot of fun to see how quickly I could get through levels that didn't demand a lot of precision, such as stages where you can slam dunk into the goal with a perfect launch right from the start if you know what you're doing. I realized pretty quickly that Banana Rumble was a return to form for the series, and I had the best time getting through the early levels while grooving to the fantastic GameCube-inspired soundtrack.

This breeze didn't last long, though, as Banana Rumble doesn't hold back in its second half. The 10 EX worlds unlocked after completing the main story completed all the Monkey Ball challenges I'd been begging to see brought back to the series. Suddenly, I was tackling grueling stages that really tested my monkey's ability, from crazy rotating devices to invisible tilting seesaws and the narrowest of paths that you have to traverse carefully, Banana Rumble is constantly offering new challenges and smart twists on old ones. Some of the final levels took me dozens of tries, and when my main monkey Ai finally smashes that one elusive target, there's nothing like that feeling. In fact, I was so engrossed in perfecting every stage Banana Rumble had to offer that one night I couldn't even be bothered to get up to turn on the lights after it got dark outside, so I ended up rolling my monkey around in complete darkness until halfway through the night. Totally worth it.

Chaos, controlled

All that fabulous stage design and variety means nothing unless feels Well, and Super Monkey Ball accomplishes this for the first time in decades. While it might seem like you're just moving your orb straight through each course, Super Monkey Ball is actually about controlling the stage, not the monkey. At its best, the control stick aligns 1:1 with the angle of the stage, giving you precise control over how the terrain tilts – and in turn, how your monkey rolls across it.

2021's Banana Mania (which recreated all of the levels found in Super Monkey Ball 1, 2, and Deluxe) should have been a home run because it returned to the best stages in the series' history, but the controls were so sluggish and unclear that it made them more frustrating at best and marginally playable at worst. Precise control is a necessity for the most difficult levels, and Banana Rumble is so good that whenever I fell off the stage it almost always seemed to be my fault, which motivated me to improve on the next run. Banana Rumble also offers extensive control options for both the stage and the camera, so I cranked up every possible setting to the max and found that it gave me the expert-level control I was looking for. The physics aren't perfect — sometimes I didn't get the level of bounce I was expecting when falling off a tall cliff — but this is still the best-feeling Super Monkey Ball since the first two.

This is the best feeling Super Monkey Ball since the first two.

Banana Rumble finally ditches the series' poorly implemented jumping mechanic (if I'm tilting the stage and my monkey is stuck in a ball, why would they be able to jump?) in favor of an exciting new Spin Dash, which takes a page from Sonic the Hedgehog and lets you charge up and release a quick burst of speed. While jumps were never more than a gimmick in previous games, the Spin Dash is a genius evolution of Monkey Ball's core mechanics. It's only mandatory in a handful of levels, but nearly every single stage has some sort of shortcut or exploit that's only possible to complete thanks to this new ability.

A properly aimed spin dash can send your poor monkey across the map in the blink of an eye, and uncovering all the ways to take advantage of this smart addition is a speedrunner's dream. Banana Rumble rewards players who understand the mechanics and level design, with alternate routes hidden in plain sight that require expert skill to reach, and it adds a lot of replay value to an already packed adventure.

Banana Split-Screen

Multiplayer is a welcome addition to the main game, something that was surprisingly missing from the previous two entries. You can tackle all 200 stages with up to three other players in split-screen local multiplayer or online co-op. Playing online with others is very smooth – I played the entire campaign online with a friend and we never had a single conflict. Banana Rumble also runs at a very smooth 60 FPS when played alone on the Nintendo Switch, and it maintains that level of performance when you add online play into the mix. Frame rates drop a little in split-screen, but not to the extent that it feels unplayable.

Playing with others turns Banana Rumble into a surprisingly strategic cooperative experience. Everyone starts a stage at the same time, and only one player has to complete it for the group to advance. It also makes each level's optional missions easier to complete: in each stage you're tasked with collecting a certain number of bananas, completing it within a certain number of seconds, and finding a hidden golden banana, which often requires high-level technology to capture. Assigning one person to reach the goal as quickly as possible while the rest look for the bananas adds a fun layer of planning to the whole experience. I also had fun tackling levels online with random players, as I helped some Monkey Ball rookies clear some of the easier worlds and worked with others to catch some of the trickier golden bananas in later stages, using encouraging emotes and phrases to cheer on my teammates. I only wish Banana Rumble also included a more traditional challenge mode, where you take turns working through all the levels individually at your own pace.

One problem with the online multiplayer is that it kicks you all out of the party after completing a world, so I had to share a new lobby code with my friend every time we wanted to continue playing. Additionally, when working through the online adventure mode, Banana Rumble doesn't show you the story cutscenes, meaning that if you want to know what's happening with Ai, Meemie, Baby, GonGon, and their new friend Palette, you'll either have to play locally or play through the gallery after watching all the cutscenes. I don't play Monkey Ball for the story – and the story here is extremely basic and barebones anyway – so I would have actually preferred not to watch the cutscenes so we could skip straight to the stages, but this seems like a strange omission.

Banana Rumble's biggest Monkey Paw wish is its aforementioned battle mode. Longtime fans of Super Monkey Ball know how iconic legacy party games like Monkey Target and Monkey Bowling are, but there's nothing here that held my attention for more than a few minutes. The five modes feel extremely shallow and uninspiring, with so few maps in rotation that I felt like I'd seen everything they had to offer in less than an hour. There's the usual racing, banana collecting, and bomb passing that feels like a cheap imitation of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's ​​battle mode. I imagine others feel the same way, as just a few days after launch it took me several minutes to find a match with a full 16 players. Local multiplayer has its limitations, as you can't play online battle mode with two people on the same system, and three-to-four player battles locally aren't even an option.

The five battle modes all feel extremely shallow and uninspiring.

But even if you ignore Banana Rumble's weak battle mode entirely, there's still plenty to do here. I've already completed all 200 stages, but I'm not even close to finishing all the stage missions – some of which I'm still scratching my head on as I try to figure out how I'm supposed to grab dozens of bananas and reach the goal in time. There are also hundreds of cosmetic items to buy with in-game points to style up your monkey. I'm a simple guy, so I bought AiAi's classic orange t-shirt from the original games and called it good, but it's cool how many outfits and accessories are available for Banana Rumble's 12 playable characters (or more, if you get the optional SEGA Pass that adds Sonic the Hedgehog and friends to the mix).

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