Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD

Genre: 3D Platformer / Arcade

Players: 1, 2-4 Competitive Minigames (Local / Local Split-Screen), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Sonic Forces + Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD bundle along with Sonic Forces, as well as in the Team Sonic Racing + Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD Bundle along with Team Sonic Racing.)

The Monkey Ball series is a long-running series of physics-based 3D Platformers with a simple Arcade-like focus that started out in arcades in 2001 and then became a cult hit on the GameCube. When the series moved to the Wii in 2006’s Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, it incorporated motion controls that were a bit divisive. Now this entry in the series has been re-released on the Nintendo Switch in 2019 without the motion controls, and with the original game’s 50 minigames cut down to a mere 10.

Visually, the game looks good for what it is, and by that I mean that the framerates and resolutions here are fantastic… but the characters and world are extremely simple. For the most part this game’s world is flat platforms against a static backdrop, with simple-looking monkeys trapped in plastic balls, so this is not a game that will visually impress anyone, but at the very least the visuals here do a great job of ensuring that they don’t interfere with the gameplay. This is joined by cutesy vocalizations from the monkeys, a disembodied announcer, and cheerful but forgettable music.

That doesn’t matter so much, because the focus of the Monkey Ball games has always been on the fast-paced but delicate gameplay, and I’m sure that many will be wondering if that gameplay made the transition back from motion controls intact. And to that I can say yes… but there are more serious problems at work here. However, I can say that the Monkey Ball games have always had excellent control and physics – that’s been their core element from the beginning, and Banana Blitz HD retains that core quality here, and when you’re not fighting the game’s major issue, it is a joy to play.

That issue? The camera.

I don’t know if the older Monkey Ball games had the same sort of camera issues that this game has and I just glossed over them with my rose-tinted nostalgia shades, or if cameras in videogames have just progressed that much since then, but Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz has one of the worst cameras I have experienced in a videogame in I can’t remember how long. Any time you want to make a sharp turn, the camera refuses to budge until you’ve gotten a distance away from it, and this can make judging both your surroundings and the basic controls a nightmare.

What’s worse, the game design of this game features inane and frustrating “boss fights” that outright require you to constantly make sharp turns like this, as if the game wanted to draw attention to its biggest flaw.

Also, I can’t review this game without addressing all of the content that has been left out. While it’s understandable that this game doesn’t have motion controls by default (the Joy-Con’s motion control simply isn’t as good as the Wii Remote’s), it’s still disappointing that no attempt was made to even add optional motion controls here. Also, while it’s understandable that many of the minigames had to be cut – so many of them were built around the motion control. However… why not replace them with minigames from the earlier games in the Monkey Ball series? At the very least, that way this game wouldn’t be on its face an inferior game with polished graphics? Also, the lack of multiplayer modes in everything except the minigames is disappointing coming from someone who fell in love with the GameCube entries in the series, which fully embraced multiplayer.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about those minigames, the “ten fan favorites”, as Sega is calling them. I don’t know who told Sega these games were their favorites, but pretty much all of them are terrible. Seesaw Ball and Whack-A-Mole are at least a little amusing, but shallow and not something you’re likely to play for long. Virtually all of the rest suffer from sluggish or non-responsive controls.

Finally, to top off this horrible package of disappointment, Sega is charging $40. That’s $40 for a game that’s over a decade old, missing a huge amount of content, and suffering from a major flaw that makes the core gameplay difficult to enjoy.

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD is not worth that price. Honestly, I’m not sure it would be worth a quarter of that price. There’s some good gameplay here, but it’s great gameplay made terrible by an awful camera, and the entire package is a disappointment because the HD polish it’s gotten still doesn’t make it visually-impressive, and the amount of content that was cut from the game is shockingly drastic. To have the nerve to botch up a job this simple and then demand $40 for it? As someone who has fond memories of the earlier games in the series, this release just makes me sad.

tl;dr – Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD is a remaster of the Wii entry in the physics-based 3D Platformer series, stripping out its motion controls and 80% of its multiplayer minigames. The core gameplay here is still good, but it’s hard to enjoy it with an absolutely atrocious camera. The minigames that remain here are all terrible, and despite being woefully feature-poor compared to the original, this game still has an outrageous price tag of $40. Extremely disappointing.

Grade: D+

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