And now you can JUMP!
Well, there's not much left for me to add, as the premise is pretty much identical to the one in Super Monkey Ball for the Gamecube, but with a few key differences. For instance, infinite continues is a quality of life improvement that made this game infinitely more accessible. You can also play stages at your own leisure, being divided in 10 stages per 8 different worlds. There are new Boss Stages which I didn't like too much, but they weren't a detriment to the game. For example, the boss of World 4 is pretty epic, as it's a giant robot dragon you need to traverse, while avoiding missiles and what not. The previous game had four playable characters, this one has six, and they have different stats, which could help with different stages.
And I almost forgot to mention... now you can jump. I actually loved this addition, and they make the most out of it as most stages need you to jump. It's also a fun tool to create your own shortcuts. I think jumping adds a welcome new dimension to the game. And mind you, while the game is definitely more accessible, and you have more tools to play with... it's still very hard. I'm not sure if it's as hard as the one on Gamecube, but this is a fairer challenge...
...which is ruined by the fact that you tilt the environment with motion controls instead of the analog stick. Honestly, it's not as terrible as it could've been, but the previous game felt so much better to control. While I wasn't able to finish the game, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't blame the motion controls on it and it was just me being horrible at the game, but that doesn't take away from the fact that playing this game doesn't feel as good as the original did. And it's so dumb, because other mods use the analog stick, they could've perfectly added the OPTION to use the analog stick. But they didn't.
Regardless, I really liked the new stages and themes. And since continues were infinite, I didn't care about spending more time until I finished a stage. I remember one of the stages in the fourth, Desert World, took me almost an hour. And I didn't mind, it wasn't as if I was gonna run out of continues and have to play every stage that came before it again. And I can't stress this enough, the motion controls are NOT horrible, but this games needs precision, analog stick was the way to go.
This entry has 50 party games.... and, as you probably guess, al of them use motion controls. For most games the motion controls are serviceable, but a scant few are nigh unplayable. It's silly, as some of them require the analog stick. But they couldn't add that option for the main game, they simply couldn't.
There's a lot I appreciate about this entry. The more forgiving difficulty curve, the accessibility, the addition of jumping... But man, the force motion controls were not a good idea. They game is FAR from unplayable, but it simply doesn't feel as good. It may also have more multiplayer games than the original, but the original's were better fleshed out and, for all intents and purposes, controlled better. All in all, I think this game is pretty much as good as the original... but it could've been so much better.
8.0
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