Monkey Madness: Island Escape for Nintendo DS: Modes and Review

Monkey Madness: Island Escape is a rail shooter for the Nintendo DS, released in North America on 23 March 2010, in which two stranded explorers fight off monkeys on an island.

Overview

Two explorers crash-land on an uncharted island. The island is held by aggressive monkeys, so the way out is a sequence of shooting stages. The ESRB describes the weapon as a water gun, while WorthPlaying names a slingshot and a stronger coconut gun and says the monkeys answer with thrown fruit.

Bananas restore health or add lives, and tokens can be collected along the way.

How it plays

VGChartz classes it as an action game and calls it a 3D rail shooter. WorthPlaying counts ten levels split between two island sections. Playing the story, you can pick either adventurer, but the choice makes no difference to how anything plays.

Three further modes share the same levels. Survival allows a single life and removes the health pickups. Time Attack asks you to replay any level for its fastest time. Versus is a two-player contest scored on points and needs two cartridges.

Control is the sticking point. Instead of tapping enemies on the touch screen, you drag the stylus to move an aiming reticle, and then use the face buttons to fire. WorthPlaying’s Brian Dumlao compared the touch pad to a trackpad rather than a direct map of the action and thought the cursor crawled.

Release and credits

North American release is dated 23 March 2010 by both WorthPlaying and VGChartz. The ESRB lists Storm City Entertainment as publisher. WorthPlaying credits 7 Raven Studios as developer, while VGChartz lists Storm City Games; WorthPlaying also uses the Storm City Games name in the body of the review while its header says Storm City Entertainment. This page reports both as printed.

The ESRB rated it E10+ for Cartoon Violence and Mild Language.

Reception

WorthPlaying gave it 4.5 out of 10 on 14 August 2010. Dumlao found it a fairly competent shooter with demanding levels, colourful environments and a smooth frame rate for a budget DS title.

Against that he set the unintuitive aiming, shooting-gallery enemies that rarely do anything, a banana-healing animation that can cost you at a bad moment, and monkey shrieks that repeat until they grate. The modes, he wrote, barely differ from one another, and he did not consider it worth buying even cheaply.

Can you still play it?

The game came on a DS card, which runs on the Nintendo DS, DS Lite, DSi and Nintendo 3DS family in DS mode. It does not run on a Wii U or Switch. DS cards are region-free unless the software is DSi-only, and nothing in the sources suggests this one is. The 3DS eShop closing on 27 March 2023 has no effect on a physical card.