Just a taste of what's to come!
Ape Escape is one of Sony's most untapped franchises, heck, look at the box, this one was published by Ubisoft instead of Sony themselves, and it's one of the few games that we actually got overseas. What is Ape Escape? They are platform games with a twist, or two, firstly, the collectibles are monkeys and secondly, the games make extensive use of both analog sticks.Jimmy, the protagonist, messes up which causes Specter, the evil albino monkey, to regain power and thus empower and control other monkeys, 300 in all. Now the monkeys are going bananas all over the world and it's up to Jimmy to catch them all again. To say that the game doesn't take itself seriously is an understatement, heck, monkeys can be found wearing the most ridiculous costumes and doing ridiculous stuff. Nothing was laugh-out-loud funny, but it's endearing nonetheless.
Stages are beautiful and fun to explore. You'll have to use your gadgets in order to clear them.
The game is divided into 20 or so small stages, and each one has a its own amount of monkeys to catch. You don't need to catch every monkey in order to proceed, but you do need to collect every monkey in order to fight the true final boss and unlock Spike, Ape Escape 1's protagonist, as a playable character. He plays just like Jimmy but has no cutscenes and has access to all gadgets from the get-go. One tiny issue I had is that the game forces you out of a stage as soon as you captured the minimum amount of monkeys required to proceed, as a completionist like myself this was a bit annoying since it meant having to return to the stage and retread old ground. And just wait until you find out that you are not really done, defeating the (fake)final boss unlocks the final gadget... and 1-2 monkeys on every previous stage, so I did every stage about 3 times. Heck, sometimes stages have monkeys that can't be caught since you haven't gotten the right gadget yet! The game is a blast so I didn't mind it too much, but it would've been nice being able to exit the stage whenever I felt like.Controls are fairly intuitive, the left analog stick moves Jimmy around and the right analog stick uses your equipped gadget. The net, used to catch monkeys, works just like the energy baton: move the right analog stick wherever you want to attack. You spin the right analog stick in order to use the gyro copter or the running wheel, or you tilt backwards in order to use the bananarang, etc. There're about 10 gadgets, and they can be put on any face button for quick access. Sadly, as you can tell, there're many more gadgets than buttons, so expect to return to the gadget equip screen fairly often. It's just a button press away, Select, but I can see it annoying a few people. Lastly, R1 and R2 jump, L1 is used to position the camera behind you, L2 goes into first person and pressing both analog sticks lets Jimmy crawl on the ground, for stealth purposes or dodging.
Bonus character Spike plays just like Jimmy but has his own voice clips.
Since both analog sticks are used for gameplay the camera can be a bit finicky, but the L1 button works well enough most of the time. The camera during boss battles can be worse though, since it's easy to lose focus on a few bosses. Regardless, during normal gameplay you can manage just fine with the L1 button.Peppered through every stage, and hidden inside enemies, are coins which can be collected and spent on a Gatcha machine in order to unlock a huge plethora of extras, including three minigames. It's way more addictive than it has any right to be.
Stealth is not mandatory, but you might skip on the monkeys' shenanigans if you alert them.
Ape Escape 2 is one of the finest platform games on the PS2. The gameplay is great fun, thanks to its fun mechanics as well as great level design. It's a bit on the easy side, but there's a lot of monkeys to collect, a lot of stages to traverse and a lot of silly extras to unlock.9.0 out of 10
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