Super Monkey Ball Adventure review

So what's left? Bananas and annoyance. This series has never had a great camera, but Adventure 's really steals the show, serving up one bad viewing angle after another and generally requiring far too much manual twiddling. The level design, while not uniformly bad, grows more aggravating as the game goes on, with some bananas placed in such a way that you feel sure that the designers are having a laugh at your expense. But hey, at least someone had some fun with this game.

Outside of the ill-fated quest, Adventure also features six multiplayer minigames (three returning, three new) and a Challenge mode consisting of 50 or so classic-style arcade levels. The returning mini-games (Race, Fighting and Target) are almost as good as their previous incarnations, while the three new games are incomprehensible (Tag), frustrating (Bounce) and mindless fun (Cannon). The inclusion of these minigames is welcome, but there's no reason to play these over the superior multiplayer entertainments of the first two Super Monkey Ball games. The same goes for the Challenge mode. Thanks, but 50 average new levels aren't much incentive to put away the superior courses of the original games.