Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD Review – All Monkey, No Magic
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD is, incredibly, the first Super Monkey Ball game to use a full-size analog stick since the GameCube era. The 3DS and Vita games in the series were beholden to smaller, less precise sticks, but playing with a DualShock 4 is like a homecoming. The original Super Monkey Ball felt designed to take advantage of the precision and range of motion, which the Gamecube controller offered, but only now has the series returned to the purity of the original game’s design.
Because of this, the opening moments of Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD, a remake of a Wii launch title with the motion controls ripped out, are lovely. Guiding your monkey through those first few goals is immediately familiar if you’ve played either of the series’ GameCube outings, but even if you’re not, there’s an inherent pleasure to the precision of the controls here. By tilting the stick you shift the level itself, rather than controlling the ball directly, and having analog control allows for a greater level of finesse than has been possible for a long time–at least at first. At its best, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD feels like the series’ latest lov…
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