Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble Reviews
It’s old-school gaming, straight to the point, simple and fun.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble is a riot - a fun party game with crazy stunts and iconic characters. It's a great balance of nostalgia and a modern experience, reminding players of the good old days while offering something fresh.
The best Monkey Ball game in over a decade is not much of a compliment, as while the adventure mode is almost up to par with the originals the multiplayer most certainly is not.
As the first entirely new Monkey Ball game in 12 years, fans of the series will at least be happy to have a selection of new stages to play through. Performance issues and a relatively sparse multiplayer offering prevent it from being considered among the best the series has to offer, however.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble is a fun game that particularly impresses with its extensive adventure mode. The majority of the 200 levels are challenging and creatively designed. In some levels, the game suffers from frustrating controls, an annoying camera and performance problems. However, I can almost entirely avoid these frustrating moments with numerous help functions and cheats. The competitive mini-games are disappointing, though. They struggle with frame rate stutters in both offline and online multiplayer. For the budget price, however, you still get a decent package with plenty of replay value.
Review in German | Read full review
But for what it actually is, Banana Rumble is an utterly adorable sequel full of charm, with some decent level design to be had. When it was at its best, it was incredibly satisfying to pull off skips and blast through stages in mere seconds. Now that it’s over, I just can’t see myself picking it up again.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble is a perfect option for fans of the Sega saga or for those who wants to test their skills, always taking into account that it has taken a step back when talking about multiplayer.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Banana Rumble is fun. I love playing it. I thought I was mostly done playing it until, about 300 words into this review, something unexpected happened: I got The Itch. I’d beaten all the levels, but I wanted to beat them again. I wanted to take a crack at the missions, which I’d largely dismissed as frivolous on my first run. I wanted to go for some records in time attack, especially pre-release, when the sparse competition would all but guarantee me a spot in the top 5. (As of right now, 6:03 a.m. on June 23rd, 2024, I have Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert beaten by two seconds on the world 1 leaderboards. Dan, if you’re reading this: your move.) The game works, in all the ways I expect it to. Maybe not in all the ways I want it to, but so what? Banana Rumble doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be good. And for Super Monkey Ball, “perfect” and “good” are very nearly the same thing.
