Ape Escape is a notable game as it is the game that really introduced the gaming industry to dual analogue controls, being the debut of the original DualShock controller. This is now a staple of modern game controllers, and it all started with this. (well, arguably it started with Goldeneye/perfect dark with their 2-controller configuration if you wanted, and I suppose twin stick shooters did exist beforehand), but nonetheless, an historically significant step forward in gaming.
Of course, control wise it is nothing like what followed, Ape escape works quite similar to the twin stick shooter, in the sense you have one stick for movement, and one for attacks/action. Throughout the campaign you receive 10 different gadgets, which can be assigned to the face buttons for quick equipping, and all actions are directed using the right analogue stick.
It’s a novel idea, and works really well in a 2d shooter plane, although gets a bit clunky in the context of a 3D platformer. Not having camera controls mapped to the right stick is definitely a lot to get used to when you’re used to modern standardizations, and I can’t think of any other game that uses shoulder buttons to jump. But those things aside it’s actually surprisingly intuitive once you get the hang of it.
For a game that is at its core a tech demo for the DualShock is fascinating in its innovation, demonstrating what this control scheme can do, and yet no other developers (to my knowledge) have ever done anything remotely similar.
It’s not the smoothest gameplay experience, but it’s implemented immensely well in the engine, the gadgets are all varied in how they are controlled and their use cases, and for the most part are all versatile, meaning there are plenty of challenges you can approach in ways other than the intended way. There are some context sensitive barriers and moments where you are locked out of certain parts of levels purely due to lack of a certain gadget, but even things like the RC car which is in theory used exclusively to access hidden areas and lure monkeys out or hit switches – have been used in speedruns to take advantage of the gadget’s explosion field being one of the most reliable powerful attacks in the game if you know how to use it. I really loved discovering this, as it’s not a glitch, the car is functioning as intended, but it’s a creative way to make use of the tools given to the player in ways that maybe weren’t considered in its implementation, and that is the sign of a good game mechanic in my eyes.
But controls aside, the core gameplay loop is the other thing that really sells the franchise. Ape Escape is a game about…apes which have escaped. Essentially, it’s a collectathon 3D platformer in the vein of something like Spyro the Dragon or Banjo Kazooie, except your primary collectibles don’t want to be collected. It’s a nice bit of chaotic action, tracking down the escaped apes, learning what the different coloured pants mean and using the level environment to plan your strategies for how to catch them with minimal fuss. Or brute forcing out of frustration and several deaths, as some of these monkeys do not fuck about. Those in green pants fire homing missiles at you if they spot you and you get too close, and those things WILL fuck you up. Red pants will have so much heavy artillery as well that you will really start to feel the stress of not having free camera control, which is a limitation, although honestly really adds to the chaotic and cartoony atmosphere of the experience, so I don’t mind it too much.
The levels themselves are fairly thematically interesting too. Sure, you have your traditional platformer level types, grassy, ice, city, carnival etc – but it’s presented in the context of travelling through time periods, starting from the Prehistoric/Jurassic era, meaning the grassy areas are full of dinosaur theming and mini bosses, and you travel forward through time the more apes you catch back to the present day. Future games were a bit more ad hoc with their theming, 3 contextualised that really well in itself, but there is a charm to the consistent world theming approach of the first game.
Some levels blur together because of this, but they do all have fun set pieces and unique quirks that you never feel the levels getting repetitive in the moment, even if looking back it can be hard to distinguish some of them.
I have finished this game before, but on a whatever number playthrough I’m on I was still finding myself discovering new strategies for approaching levels, playing with stealth a lot more, even bypassing some mini bosses by being careful and sneaking rather than running in arms blazing as I used to play it. All this combines to create levels that are genuinely fun to explore and route and gives great replay satisfaction.
There are a few things that annoy me about the game, it has the Mario 64 problem of booting you out the level when you reach a goal/target – but unlike Mario which will at least mix up some of the things available to you in a level when you get new stars, Ape Escape just arbitrarily boots you out when you hit the ape catching quota of the level. Some levels are impossible to complete 100% on a first playthrough due to the aforementioned gadget roadblocks that require revisiting later on, but others can very easily be completed, and not giving you the option to carry on often means that some of the longer levels require a lot of replaying through them, with the first half much emptier than previously due to some of the major obstacles being absent when you caught them, and it just feels like padding. Now the intended thing to do is to finish the campaign, and then do all the levels again to get the rest, so you won’t feel like you’re repeating yourself back-to-back, but it is still frustrating and arbitrary.
And there are definitely some apes who feel kind of broken, the ones that require luring out with the RC car in particular are much harder in this game than either of the sequels. Some of the hiding places have a lot of traps to lose the car meaning you have to respawn and try again, and the apes are often erratic and react with violence rather than running away. Outside of these specific RC cages that works well as you have to think on the fly how is best to tackle any given ape, but in the cages, you can’t get to them until they are chased out, and that only seems to work half the time. Even something like a horn or something on the car to spook them to more reliably run would be great. I feel like the car was a bit more useful in later games and the apes more consistent and less cruelly laid out.
Another problem with this specific scenario is that with the PS1 graphics you need to follow the car from outside to really see what it’s doing, this can make it really awkward to line it up, and also means that once you do chase apes out of their bunker, they will spot you and immediately re-hide. So, you have to hide yourself, whilst luring them out, which is just not practical due to needing the view to navigate some of the trickier ones. Again, this could’ve been fairly easily solved with a first-person view on the car, something which I feel would’ve been possible as they did get one with the slingshot.
Some of the platforming feels a bit janky as well – the double jump makes you lose all forward momentum, which I guess makes sense from a design perspective, giving you a trade off for the extra height, but it feels really dissatisfying to do. With the dash hoop you also lose momentum if you jump out of it. Speedrunners have found exploits to circumvent these things, and they are satisfying to pull off, but this is definitely a case of developer oversight rather than well designed gadgets.
Speaking of speedrunning, the levels all have time attacks as well. This playthrough is the first time I really did them, and they were mostly pretty easy, although some of them I definitely used exploits that weren’t accounted for in the time limits. The slingshot inexplicably has a very easy glitch that allows you to do infinite jumps, letting you bypass large parts of levels with ease and more quickly get to certain areas and ambush the apes. I tried to avoid using it on first playthroughs as it can trivialize some levels, although while it’s easy to use, the skips that it is used in the speedrun require a lot more skill than just pulling off the glitch, you need to apply it as well. As it stands I sometimes resorted to it when I was frustrated at getting thrown back to the beginning of a very long room to quickly get back to where I died without doing the whole challenge again, but most if its usage was applied to the time trials, which still feels in the spirit of the challenge, using what the game gives you, intentionally or not, to complete its objectives as quickly as possible.
My one gripe with the time trials is that they function by only asking you to collect 2-6 apes per level – which for early levels is fine, it allows you to route and strategize, and allows you freedom to adjust your sights to the apes who you are more confident going for and still giving you a decent shot at the time. But for later levels you end up not seeing more than half of the level. I guess they did this to keep them fast paced, as some levels could definitely take over 10 minutes to catch all apes in, but give that the game by design doesn’t even let you catch all apes in one go for usual, it’d be really nice to have a built in challenge where you can 100% levels against the clock, as this can’t even be self-engineered, as outside time trials apes stay caught once they’ve been caught once. As it is, the most efficient ways to do late game levels is by not bothering to do more than the first room, which is often the least interesting part.
They also allow you to pause the timer by collecting coins, I assume as a nod to the way Crash 3 handled time trials. It’s a nice touch and does provide those secondary collectables some use in the trials, but the way the levels are laid out there aren’t that many times where they’re really in useful places to integrate into your route, and the time targets are generous enough that they don’t really make much difference.
I’ve not talked about the bosses all that much, they’re a bit weighted towards the end of the game, the first proper boss being like 4-5 levels from the end. I remember it feeling a bit more jarring than it did, but honestly the difficulty curve in the game is still fairly consistent and the level challenges do generally make up for the lack of traditional bosses in the early game. You also get optional races with your rival, which are fun, but for a game that isn’t particularly designed for fast linear platforming does feel a bit out of place, and just makes me wish for longer time trials for the main levels which combine the platforming with exploration and action.
You’ve also got hidden coins as extra collectibles, these unlock mini games which also use the dual stick controller in interesting ways, including a skiing mini game where each leg is controlled by one stick, a boxing game where each arm is, and a literal twin stick shooter. I had the most fun with the last one, although presentation wise it is just a very dull take on the genre and other than first exposure to it for kids there’s no reason to play that over any number of modern indie games in that style.
I haven’t spoken about the presentation much, Ape Escape is fascinating as it’s a game that has a separate English and American dub, and all the games in the series have this. The English/European dub is…the voice acting is not good. It sounds like the main character is a year 7 who hasn’t been bullied enough reading his lines off the script out loud with barely any convincing emoting. Like a really bad CITV show that you remember being better when you were 5. The other characters aren’t as bad, but footage I’ve seen from the American dub sound a lot better and like actual voice actors were paid to do it. This isn’t something that fundamentally impacts the experience, but the cutscenes are tedious and slow paced because of it. You can skip them, but if you want to experience the story/contextualization of the gameplay like me, you generally won’t want to unless you’ve already seen it recently. The music is also very eh as well. I’ve heard people praise it, but it doesn’t do anything for me. It services the atmosphere fine, but compared to the sequel it is incredibly bland and forgettable. If you prefer more ambient video game soundtracks to the more chirpy and bouncy tunes more typical in your sonics and crash bandicoots etc then it is a good example of that, but personally it didn’t leave a mark on me. (It does have dynamic instrumentation that is dampened when you are crawling which is always a fun touch, it’s such a simple trick but its implementation really does help with the immersion.) Graphics wise it’s a PS1 game, and it looks like one. The colours are vibrant, the polygons are blocky, personally I’m indifferent to the PS1’s graphical vibe, but if you have strong positive or negative feelings of those graphics, then this game is more of them, so do with that what you will.
All in all, I think Ape Escape is a very interesting game to revisit, although with a caveat that it was a creative first in many of its gameplay aspects and that does show. I remember Ape Escape 2 being much more polished, and it seems to be the one that people remember the most fondly. It’s also the easiest one to find if you want a physical copy. 1, at least in PAL regions is a bit of a rarity, to the point that my copy says in big letters “Rental only, NOT for resale”.
It has a lot of the short comings of most early 3d platformers, but it wins you over with charm and innovation and satisfying gameplay at its core.
Fun bit of history, if you like the genre and specifically the retro quirks of the genre from this era, then definitely recommend. Otherwise probably not worth playing, as this game won’t win you over if you’re not already interested in the style.
