Astheape,youchargeacross
procedurally-generated mazes from a
top-down view, shoving, grabbing,
and tossing the human-shaped
enemies in your way. It’s like a
twin-stick shooter, where one analog
stick controls
movement and the
other rotation, but your
guns are your biceps –
you can shove humans
into walls or each
other, as well as grab
them, which causes
them to reflexively fire
their weapon wherever
you point them. I preferred the
mouse and keyboard controls, where
WASD moves and the mouse controls
the direction I’m facing.
You’re fragile here, but not Hotline
Miami fragile. You’re an ape. Nothingeverslowsyoudown,nothingcan
stop your shoves. The biggest
enemies splat just as hard as the
smallest. A few opportunities for
added style are satisfying, too. In one
set of levels, you can push enemies
out of skyscraper
windows, whipping
them toward the street
with fantastic force.
This all happens
fast. Ape Out demands
snap judgments. I
surprise a bomb guy
and shove him toward
another bomb guy,
exploding them at a safe distance
from me. Immediately I have to grab
a shotgun guy before he can shoot,
spin him around and chuck him at
another shotgun guy to block his shot
and double-splat them. Then I smash
through a glass pane and shove three
more guys into splats along a
corridor, because sometimes tactics
aren’t needed, just ape arms.
As I improvise through levels, the
jazz percussion improvises along
with me, rising to the action and
throwing crashes and squeaks and
snares and bells in to mark each kill.
Ape Out is divided into four eight-
level ‘albums,’ each with its own
rhythms and instruments and
themes. Together with the stark,
unstable colour fields that make up
the levels, the weird perspective, and
the nonsensical, randomised maze
layouts, the high-tension music
induces the anxiety of being an
animal in an unfamiliar environment,
lashing out against what’s hurting
me, scrambling and circling back and
shoving everything.
There are 32 levels, plus one
bonus level, and while they aren’t
exceptionally long, they aren’tbite-sized, either. It’s frustrating to
diejustbefore reaching safety, and
theapecan’t take many shots. While
completing every level only took me
a fewhours, Ape Out sadly felt
sluggishby the time I got to the third
album.The difficulty feels too
dependent on randomisation, and
manyofthe levels are disappointingly
similar to each other.APE ESCAPISM
After my delirious early
experimentation, I wondered where
this strange game about splats and
snare drums was going to go, and I
wasn’t too impressed when it added
exploding barrels. More variety
comes from new enemy types, but
they’re mostly just annoying:
flamethrower guys are best avoided,
and rocket launcher guys ruin
everything if they spawn in too large
a number or at an awkward spot.
The procedural generation and
randomised enemy placements don’t
help. Like Super Meat Boy and
Hotline Miami (the first one), Ape
Out takes pride in killing you, but
dying rarely feels like the learning
experience it is in those games. It’s
just something that happened
because I got mobbed by too many
guys, or went the wrong way without
any way to know what the right way
was, as the level changes every time.
Ape Out is so thunderously stylish
and thematically strong that I like it
even though it loses its thrust so
quickly. It evokes anxiety and fear
with brutal efficiency, so if you’ve
ever wanted to feel like a cornered
animal – or me whenever someone
asks me a direct personal question –
here’s your chance.
Those uncomfortable feelings
just aren’t balanced with quite
enoughtriumph.NEEDTOKNOW
WHATISIT?
A top-downaction
gameaboutanape
who’shadenough
EXPECTTOPAY
£11
DEVELOPER
Gabe Cuzzillo, Matt
Boch, Bennett Foddy
PUBLISHER
Devolver Digital
REVIEWED ON
GeForce GTX 980, Core
i7-6700K, 16GB RAM
MULTIPLAYER
None; but there are
Arcade leaderboards
LINK
apeout.com70
Ape Out is a sensational
audiovisual experience
that unfortunately starts
to drag around halfway
in. Also, jazz.VERDICTAfew
opportunities
for added
style are
satisfying, tooA
n escaping ape only has a few options, one of which is
shoving her captors into walls so hard that all the blood flies
out of their bodies. That’s the plan for Ape Out’s ape, and it’s
pretty much the whole plan. After the first human goes splat,
the percussive jazz kicks in, and a dizzying improv violence
session begins. While Ape Out starts to drag after the first couple of acts,
it’s hard to put down anyway, because it feels so consistently cool.DRUM ATTACK
Colour and music elevate APE OUT’s
bloody shove combat. By Tyler Wilde
WHAT APES WANT
Motivate the apes
DONKEY KONG
To kidnap princesses.APE ESCAPE
To avoid being kidnapped.SUPER MONKEY BALL
Monkeys aren’t apes.APE OUT
To escape from skyscrapers.RAMPAGE
To punch skyscrapers.OVERWATCH
To d o s cie n c e?CONCLUSION
Apes are full of contradictions.Ape Out
REVIEW