We’ve had a soft spot for the slightly weird Ape Escape series ever since it appeared on PlayStation back in the late nineties, heralding a new dawn of analogue control and truly breaking new ground by being one of the first games that could only be played using Sony’s then brand-new dual analogue controller.

The Ape Escape games have always been quirkily Japanese and this one continues in the same manner, with the highly-intelligent monkey called Specter using an army of mind-controlled monkeys to invade Earth in a fleet of flying saucers. Naturally it’s your job to catch ‘em all and stop Specter from destroying mankind (or something like that). The intro and cut scenes are done in the old-school Manga style, but unfortunately they promise a lot more than you actually get from the game. Two girls live next door and their scientist Grandma (who appears to have the worst case of mumps ever seen) invented a machine to catch Specter that can cross between the past and present in pursuit and using this the girls send you in pursuit of the Monkey leader.

Yep, I’m afraid it’s true; each level simply scrolls before you, the object being to shoot bunches of bananas for score and to recharge your health, whilst simultaneously catching as many monkeys as you can. You aim your catapult with the Move controller and fire at the bananas with ‘B’. When monkeys attack you can quickly switch to your net by pressing the ‘Move’ button and then swish the net in the correct direction to catch the monkey. Monkeys will sometimes appear to the left or right or even to the rear of your view so you have to rotate the camera with the Move controller’s ‘X’ and ‘Circle’ buttons, which just about works, but feels awful and would have been much better set to the Move Navigation controller (which few games, even Sony ones seem to use) or second PS3 controller’s analogue stick, or better yet, left out altogether. There’s also a “Smasher” (inexplicably looks like a paper fan) for twatting things, although this is only available at certain times, an Ape Vacuum and a Bananarizer (that zaps bananas or monkeys that are out of reach) that can be used when you have a battery in your inventory (extra batteries can be spotted and shot with your catapult as you travel through a level, some of which you’ll only get brief glimpse of.) Both the catapult and the net follow your real movements very accurately, so the game, much like your average Premier League footballer, is simple as hell, but plays well enough-for a while at least.

The “Goodies” section features things like the training mode and a facility to record your own “GOTCHA!” voice sample that will play EVERY damn time you catch a monkey-so don’t make it anything too irritating. There’s also a 39-page Monkeypedia full of all the monkeys in the game! (No, really, it’s true) and a section where you can re-view any of the cut scenes from the game.

For the most part the game is pretty easy, but it piles on the monkeys after ten or so levels and the difficulty curve becomes a vertical cliff, at this point any fun you may have been having flies out the window as more and more monkeys attack you, and depending of your temper the game disc and your Move controller may follow. I have no idea which age group the game is aimed at, as failure is often welcomed with an unkind “You Think This Is Hard?” or even “You’re Terrible!” message, and with no restart points failure in a level means you go right back to the start. Oh Dear. This’ll soon lead to frustration for kids and the game simply isn’t good enough to keep drawing adults back, which I suspect means a lot of people will be binning it very quickly.

There’s nothing wrong with Ape Escape as such it just lacks any of the imagination or charm that the first three games had, and the potential for a truly super monkey chasing, exploring, Move controller-swishing adventure has gon begging, You have to wonder who the numpties are that decided to let the franchise go down this on-rails blind alley, and then also made the game so frustrating to play. If you’re looking for a platform to test out your Move controller then there are many better ones around, in fact just about all of them are.