Almost a decade after the impossibly cute Aiai the monkey rolled to the end of his first adventure, lucky Wii owners are getting a fresh helping of Sega’s simian star. Will Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll make you go ape or does it end up slipping on one of its own banana skins? Check out our Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll review to find out.
Sega’s Super Monkey Ball series is a curious beast; it’s one of those franchises that felt way ahead of its time when it made its debut but has strangely stagnated in recent years. The ball-rolling gameplay is a perfect fit for the Wii’s motion-based control mechanism but aside from 2006’s rather forgettable Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, Sega has been strangely reluctant to build on this tangible promise.
Thankfully for Wii-owning fans of cute, big-eared primates Sega’s indifference towards the series has come to an end in the form of Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll. As the title subtly suggests, this latest instalment allows you to use the Wii Balance Board as a control interface, which gives you sufficient reason to retrieve yours from the cupboard and dust it off after months of neglect.
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For newcomers, the aim of Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll is blissfully straightforward. You have to get your monkey avatar – who happens to be encased in a sphere, hamster-style – from one end of the level to the other. Rather than control your character directly, you actually have to tilt the environment to influence the position and momentum of the ball.
As was the case with Banana Blitz, the Wii Remote provides the ideal control method for this type of game – it’s almost as if the entire Super Monkey Ball concept was constructed with the Wii in mind. Sadly, things are less convincing when you bring the Balance Board into play; it simply doesn’t offer the appropriate degree of control required, despite the fact that the developers have clearly simplified the challenge in order to accommodate its use. In fact, the entire package often feels like a stripped-down edition of the game, shorn of all the storyline, boss encounters and other progressive trappings offered by previous sequels.
It’s only when you start to play the multitude of mini-games featured in Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll that you begin to see why Balance Board support was included; in these short-burst, multi-player friendly snippets of action the peripheral is used far more convincingly. Indeed, as a party game, Aiai’s latest outing is a considerable success.
While it may not pack the punch of its forebears Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll does feature plenty of social gaming potential and is worth considering if you’re stuck for a light-hearted party game that can be effortlessly appreciated by all the family.
