Fun, stylish, and very short. Play as a gorilla escaping from captivity, breaking everything and everyone in your path while someone demolishes a drumkit in the background. The gameplay is deliberately kept simple, with your attacks limited to sending enemies flying by way of weighty punches, or alternatively grabbing them to be used as human shields, causing them to start aimlessly firing their weapons, giving you an impromptu ranged attack. Your voyage back to the jungle will no doubt be cut short in a hail of gunfire many times over, but the pace is fast enough and the campaign short enough to avoid any major frustrations and the game on the whole feels a lot more forgiving than many of its carnage-happy top-down bretheren. But really, it's the visual style and soundtrack that sets Ape Out apart. The game utilizes stark, high-contrast, heavily simplified visuals, which help to keep proceedings easily readible, even when the action grows frantic, always underscored by the unique soundtrack, which consists entirely of percussion, dynamically changing to match the actions happening on-screen, so launching a puny human into a concrete wall may lead to a fitting cymbal hit, but then his friends start bearing down and the resistance grows stiff, causing the background drumming to grow more intense and frantic. Other instruments are used very sparingly but the skinwork is varied and intricate enough to not grow repetitive.
In the end, Ape Out is a seriously fun little romp that effectively covers up its lack of depth by focusing on stylish mayhem and immediate satisfaction. Recommended to fans of Hotline Miami, Jazzheads and militant animal rights activists.
Final rating: 7.8/10
originally written on 30/04/2024
