Monkey King: The Legend Begins

Rating Everyone Genre first-person-shooter Publisher UFO Interactive External Links Official UFO Interactive Website

Yeah, yet another game, story, setting, etc, flaunting the old tale of the Monkey King. Rehashed for the hundredth time, the little cloud-flying monkey takes his adventure to a new level of side-scrolling shooter fun. Well, fun might be too strong a word for that.

There are a few different play modes to this epic adventure: story mode, arcade mode, and multiplayer mode. The differences are quite astounding, so be ready for this. Story mode adds 5-10 lines of uninspired typed dialog between each stage of the arcade mode and multiplayer lets you *gasp* play at the same time. Each mode lets you play through the same six, count 'em, six levels without any difference whatsoever. If you really want to mix things up, you can choose a female sprite to play with!

Gameplay is lethargic. You pilot your cloud up, down, left, and right around the screen slowly. Tilting the Wiimote tilts the screen to speed up or slow down the approach of the off screen scenery. The slow movement would be deadly, except the sthird weapon power up becomes an unstoppable hailstorm of wiggly lines, lasers, and bullets. It gets even worse when you kill random critters that guard doors to a shop that lets you buy secondary weapons, building up your arsenal to the point where you are blocking out the screen. In fact, once you get fully upgraded with power-ups, which takes a whole level to do, you kill everything the moment in shows up on screen. Bosses take a whole second to kill, unleashing their one “deadly” attack before being destroyed by your maddening assault of pew pew.

While the graphics are not bad, they are not impressive either. Two-dimensional sprites on a sliding backgrond hasn't evolved much over the years, and frankly, this game would have been done just as well or even better on the SNES. The music is uninteresting and a whopping playtime of fifteen minutes really isn't worth the time liberating the game from is cellophane wrapper. I am fairly sure that even a six year old would find this game lackluster. Don't waste you time on this one folks.