Monkey World 4.0

There is no decree that says simple arcade games should have a theme that works. Though they kind of have it. Pac Man needs to clean the room of pellets for some reason and Mario needs to rescue the princess. The unnamed monkey in Monkey World has no specific purpose however. At least nothing is shared. The player controls a monkey with a cap and backpack across a world full of floating blocks, bottomless pits and random pipe outcroppings. It sounds familiar, doesn't? You would say that if you would suddenly find yourself into a Mushroom Kingdom replica called Monkey World, then you would see monkeys walking on floating ledges or something. Well, as it turns out there is only one monkey in Monkey World, the rest being green turtles, blue turtles, red turtles, red flying pigeon turtles, small black turtles, giant wasps, floating arrowheads and some sort of wraiths.

The game consists in guiding the protagonist across a linear level in order to get to the end and grab the banana stalk. During your travels you can collect coins and jump on moving fauna, both of which yield points. Points are used solely for you own personal gratification as they have no importance within the game. You might also find green mushrooms which grant one extra life each. Lives are lost whenever you touch an "enemy" incorrectly or when you drop off a platform, never to be seen again. There is an extra level of protection. When you are about to loose your last life due to an encounter you get to activate a special shield that saves your monkey behind and squashes any critter that you happen to cross paths with for a limited time. This can only be done twenty times unfortunately. However, if you want to get more shield reserves you will need to wait for the developer to actually implement this.

The game controls are simple enough. You get to move in two directions, perform a jump, or duck to avoid flying things. Jumping is the hardest thing to master in this game, but once you do it (and it doesn't take long) you could continuously hop through an entire level with only a couple of hiatuses such as hitting a wall or jumping over a wide pit.

Conclusion

There is not much else to say about Monkey World. All in all if the movement would have been more natural and if coins would have had some real purpose other than abstract scoring, then this would have been a better game altogether. At least it's stable and provides some challenge.