Crazy Monkey Spin

Have you got a thing for cute and cheeky monkeys? Do you enjoy puzzle solving? Then you’ll go bananas for Crazy Monkey Spin!

This title is quite a challenging and interesting game to play although if you suffer from dizziness then you might well want to take a breather between each round. The basic idea is that you’re challenged to rescue a variety of family and friends of the animal kingdom from their cages. Although this varies in difficulty with each level, it’s only really a variation on a theme.

For the first few games it’s a case of simply swinging from trunk to trunk by timing your swing to perfection. You press 5 or the OK key to release at the right time and launch yourself in the direction desired. Your monkey will automatically grab the next trunk and start spinning round and round again for you to then repeat this action all the way around the course.

On your way you will discover bananas in various locations, to score and unlock certain missions it’s important to gather all of these. However, if you really want to just scoot through this game, you can focus on just unlocking your friends from their entrapment.

In later stages the difficulty gets harder, which causes you to adopt a bit more of a strategic approach. This is achieved by having you rescue up to three baby pandas, for example, before you can unlock the adult and thus complete the level. To do this you will have to explore all the level and figure out how to do this. Fortunately this isn’t too difficult to do and you have various things to help you and to keep your interest going, such as trampolines – which will help launch you in a direction to reach otherwise unobtainable branches.

This game does get very repetitive despite these little changes in the level designs and additional obstacles. Although these keep the game a little more bit addictive, it rapidly gets quite monotonous nonetheless.

You’ll certainly get quite a few hours of entertainment should you wish to play this from start to finish. I say hours rather than minutes just because your monkey spins both clockwise and anti-clockwise and if your timing is off, you can quickly end up undoing all the hard work you’ve managed to do previously up until that point – causing you to have to try and do it all over again. This isn’t too frustrating as it’s not usually too hard to complete a level or solve the best way to collect every item along the way.

Overall then, this is a fun and charming puzzle game with a hint of action and has some endearing qualities which will certainly keep your attention for quite a while. If you like more traditional puzzles then you may find this more hit-and-miss than a total success, however, it’s got quite a bit of potential and I don’t doubt there’ll be a second version to follow on from this in the future.

Rating 84%

Positives

Plenty of levels

Quite easy but does have some challenging moments

Good graphics

Negatives

Very repetitive

I fear this game’s a little too easy for many gamers

Possibly lacking real addictive qualities