Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble is a welcome revival, but far from the series’ best

It might be hard to believe, but we somehow managed to go 12 years without a brand new Super Monkey Ball game. Although Sega has kept the franchise alive with HD Remasters and remakes, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Rumble is the first entirely new entry in the series since Banana Splits on PS Vita.

This Switch exclusive boasts 200 new stages and a Battle mode for up to 16 players, but while it is undoubtedly a Super Monkey Ball game at its core, there are a number of issues that will leave series fans disappointed. Rather than simply delivering a succession of stages, the game’s main Adventure mode contains cutscenes for the first time in a while, though the story doesn’t quite challenge the works of Harper Lee in terms of impact.

It revolves around a new monkey called Palette, who wants to find the Legendary Banana by collecting seven special artifacts called the OOPArts. When her father gets in the way, things start to get a little messy, but the usual Monkey Ball crew is there to help Palette explore Juicy Island and find the Legendary Banana.

There are 10 themed worlds, each consisting of ten stages. Each world is bookended with a cutscene introducing the theme, and one showing the group collecting a new trinket and continuing on their journey. It’s all fairly throwaway stuff, but friends of Monkey Ball lore may get a kick out of it regardless.

Once these stages are beaten a further 100 are unlocked, which is just as well because the initial 100 aren’t the most difficult in the world, and have pretty uninspired level designs on top of that (though Stage 10-5 can burn in a fire).

The EX stages, which are essentially stages 101-200, start off slightly tricky and end up becoming particularly infuriating, as is the Monkey Ball way. They’re also far more inventive too, with more interesting level designs.

A new addition to the game is a speed boost which can be charged with the B button. By charging the boost and releasing it at the right time you can get a little jolt of speed, which is handy for hurdling small lips on the ground, getting that extra oomph to reach the top of a slope, or performing a last minute change of direction to avoid falling off an edge.

Purists will baulk at this new addition, but it’s rare that a stage will outright require the speed boat, and it’s perfectly possible to play through the vast majority of the game without pressing the B button at all. That said, its addition will also doubtless allow for some fun new tricks among the small community of Monkey Ball ninjas who dedicate their lives to ‘breaking’ the game and finding ways to complete stages as quickly as possible.

Banana Rumble appears to have similar physics to Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania – the 2021 remake of the first three games – which previously disappointed some fans because it wasn’t an exact replication of the original Super Monkey Ball physics.

Things still feel a little lighter here, and while it hardly makes the game a complete disaster and nobody other than complete Monkey Ball die-hards will actually care much, those who do notice these things will acknowledge the change compared to the GameCube titles.

That said, if you’re one of the series devotees who hated the physics in Banana Mania and found the game ruined beyond repair as a result, you might want to sit this one out too.

One thing that affected our enjoyment more was the game’s performance. Super Monkey Ball is famous for having a solid 60 frames per second on practically every format – even the DS game Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll managed to hit 60fps, a solid accomplishment for Nintendo‘s underpowered handheld.

And yet, as we played Banana Rumble, something felt slightly off. It didn’t feel quite as smooth as previous games had. So we captured some footage and ran some tests on it. The game technically does run at 60 frames per second – the clock and various other effects (such as rotating bananas) update 60 times every second, so this is a 60fps game by definition.

However, on every sixth frame the ball doesn’t move at all, no matter how fast it’s travelling, meaning the game is essentially playing at a strange 50fps rate with subtle constant stutters (not to mention the actual pauses at times during busier moments).

It’s something that happens so quickly that you might not notice it while playing, but it does make the game look and feel slightly less smooth than previous Monkey Ball titles, to the extent that long-time fans of the series will feel something slightly off.

“On every sixth frame the ball doesn’t move at all, no matter how fast it’s travelling, meaning the game is essentially playing at a strange 50fps rate with subtle constant stutters.”

Faring worse is the game’s Battle mode, which contains five multiplayer games for up to 16 players (you can play online or add CPU bots to make up the numbers. There’s no Party mode here, so fans of Monkey Target and the like will be disappointed to find that the only multiplayer options here are to play through the Adventure mode in co-op or take on these five Battle games.

There’s Race (where you try to reach the goal first), Banana Hunt (where you try to collect the most bananas), Ba-Boom (where you play tag with bombs), Goal Rush (where teams try to go through as many goals as possible) and Robot Smash (where teams gain points for running into robots at speed), and that’s it.

The problem is, each one of these Battle games, even if only played full-screen with one player and a bot, runs at 30 frames per second. This wouldn’t be an issue in most games – we’re not precious about frame rates like some are.

For Super Monkey Ball, however, where speed and quick reactions are the order of the day, these multiplayer games feel extraordinarily sluggish, particularly if you’ve just finished playing through the Adventure mode and are switching over to a near-halving of the frame rate.

This is a disappointing dip in performance for a series that specialises in it, especially considering that this is a Switch exclusive. Switch owners have seen plenty of examples of multi-format games not running quite as well on Nintendo’s handheld, but with no other platforms to cater for here it’s very disappointing that the Switch version doesn’t run at a solid 60fps in both modes.

The backgrounds are nice and detailed, but Super Monkey Ball doesn’t have to be The Last of Us – we’re sure most players would have happily taken a visual hit in some areas in favour of smoother, faster gameplay.

All this combines to make for a game that is still a fun enough entry in the Super Monkey Bowl series, but will be in nobody’s list of the best it has to offer.

It’s sure to pass the time, and fans of Monkey Ball will welcome the addition of 200 new stages to play through, but the reduced performance (especially in Battle mode) and the general lack of other Party mini-games makes this a by-the-numbers addition to a much-loved series.