Ape Escape

This lack of variety wouldn't be so bad if it weren't implemented in such a cack-handed fashion. For one thing, this game is frustratingly hard. It's easy enough to reach the end of most stages, but to earn the high scores you need supernatural reflexes and the patience of a saint. The capture mechanism feels flaky, with apes only vulnerable to your net in a very thin area, which often leaves you flailing around while they swipe your bananas as your net passes through them. The slingshot has a spongy pull-back-and-fire control that feels sluggish when you need to be quick on the draw.

Later stages start to throw exploding objects at you, while UFOs shoot at you, and apes begin to attack from off-screen, forcing you to shift the view manually to find them. You could probably make it through these gauntlets reasonably unscathed with hours of practice and the ability to anticipate dozens of random attack patterns, but the core experience just isn't entertaining enough to warrant such dedication. Considering this is ostensibly a game for kids, it's a ridiculously punishing piece of game design, offering virtually no reward for exhausting amounts of effort.

It's not even as if these drab funfair rides are interactive. You can smash crates and signs as you roll past, but the world is otherwise completely dead. You'd think that a vending machine would do something amusing if you hit it, but it doesn't even plop out a single can. Those enormous dinosaurs must surely react when pranged on the nose with a slingshot? Nope, they just keep cycling through their lifeless animation.

A few more gadgets, introduced as the story mode plods along, would also help to liven things up but by the time you've finished the tutorial you'll have seen everything the game has to offer.

To be fair, there are three multiplayer mini-games to pad things out, but these are similarly uninspired and do little to add to the overall package. Worse, only one of them is unlocked at the start - Tag Rally, a fidgety RC racer, where one player steers with a normal controller while another shoots at targets using Move. The others - Slingsniper and Sprayzer Defence Force - are unlocked after a lot of grinding and fail to justify the slog to get there.

As a free pack-in demo released with Move, this would have been more passable. But even at a budget price, this new Ape Escape offers only thin and joyless gruel, and is particularly bad at satisfying its intended younger audience. You can't even play the story mode with a friend, not even taking it in turns, making it a strangely antisocial party game.

The original Ape Escape was charming and innovative, but this entry is as basic as motion gaming gets. What really hurts is that there's no reason why Ape Escape couldn't have been the game to take the waggle genre to the next level, if only it had a bit more passion behind it.