Love/Hate: Ape Escape – Pumped & Primed

Welcome back to the Ape Escape Love/Hate series! As I alluded to at the end of the Ape Escape 2001 Love/Hate article, I’ve decided that I am going to dabble with some of the franchise’s more esoteric spin-off games. Today we’ll be looking at Ape Escape: Pumped & Primed. This spin-off deviates even more heavily than Ape Escape 2001 did from the adventure platforming of the mainline games, pivoting to a multiplayer-focused, Mario Party-style minigame gauntlet. However, unlike many of the Ape Escape spin-offs, Pumped & Primed was deemed good enough to get a North American release (although it did not make it to Europe this time, for whatever reason). I can actually remember seeing this game on store shelves when I was a teen, but I never bought it because I had no interest in a party game and it had gotten pretty middling reviews. There these reviews warranted, or is Pumped & Primed a good game in its own right? Read on to find out…

Love

• The Cast – One of the cool features of Pumped & Primed is that it lets you play as several different Ape Escape characters, including familiar faces such as Spike, Natalie, the Professor, and Casi*. You can also play as one of the series’ iconic apes, or as a new group of colour-coordinated robo-apes called the Pipotrons. Having the choice is already cool enough, but by far the most interesting detail is that each character plays differently than any other. In addition to having unique skills (which we will get to later), they also get unique versions of each gadget (eg, Spike and Helga have standard stun clubs, but Casi’s is a ranged homing attack instead, while The Professor’s is a giant claw that he can grab and throw you with, and Natalie’s is a big broom). This can get wildly imbalanced (Casi’s ranged attack is superior to the slingback shooter in nearly every way), but it’s such a cool feature that I can’t be overly concerned about it.
• Acid Trip Cutscenes – There are some really weird intermission cutscenes in this game. They don’t really do anything to progress the plot or show your character’s personality, they’re just fucking bizarre, like something out of a Hideaki Anno project. Maybe this isn’t a strong “love” point, but hey, at least it made me feel something.

*Side-tangent here: When I was a kid playing these games, I never understood that Casi (aka, Charu) was an AI program. I would wonder why she would show up at the start of each level, but we’d never get to interact with her in any levels or cutscenes. It gave her an air of mystery, especially since she has a very cool character design. She never really got to do anything cool in the first game and then disappeared from the mainline games, so I’m always happy when she shows up again.

Mixed

• Boss Battles – So perhaps the most interesting deviation from the standard party game formula Pumped & Primed takes is that, after every few levels, you will get thrown into a co-op boss battle (or just do it solo if you’re playing single player). It’s pretty cool to go from being cutthroat and competitive with your friends, but then suddenly have to turn it around and work together to defeat a boss. The only reason I can’t put this any higher than “mixed” though is that these boss fights are very mediocre and drawn-out affairs, and each battle is recycled multiple times, but the concept is good enough to make them feel better than the sum of their parts.
• The Graphics – Pumped & Primed ditches the series’ traditional, 90s-3D-platformer art style in favour of a heavily cel-shaded style. Ape Escape has always gone for a “Saturday morning anime” vibe, and I think that that was the impetus behind implementing this cel-shaded style, but I don’t think that it looks very good in execution. Ape Escape 2 looked so good, so it’s kind of sad to see them go for something that’s somehow more stylized, but less appealing.
  • Also, why are everyone’s arms so goddamn long!?!
• Controls – Perhaps the greatest asset of Pumped & Primed is that nearly every minigame is based around a gadget or vehicle from the mainline Ape Escape games, so the control schemes and gameplay are already tried-and-tested fun. That said, there are a few gadgets brought over which are fine when you’re hunting apes, but don’t really work well in a four-player free-for-all. Fittingly, the worst-controlling minigame is the one that’s seen the most overhauls to controls and gameplay: the water net. This has been turned into more of a miniature submarine that fires torpedoes. The controls on this one are really weird, being partially-inverted with no control customization options available to make this easier to wrap your head around.
• Skills – Around halfway through a run, the game will unlock the ability to use skills. The game will generously throw skill points at you during gameplay, which you can spend by pressing any two adjacent face buttons (eg, X + Circle, Square + X, etc). Each character has four unique skills, and the ability to summon a helper ape to attack enemies. While this is an interesting idea, the execution leaves something to be desired for several reasons:
  • First of all, you can’t just equip and assign skills as you’d like. Oh no, that would be too simple. Instead, the skills you have are determined by how you assign your gadgets to the face buttons. The game does not tell you this or how to get the skills you want, so you basically have to look up a guide or figure it out through trial and error.
  • Secondly, some skillsets are wildly imbalanced, to the point of making certain characters flat-out worse to play. While it is kind of nice that they make characters more unique, it can feel bad if your favourite character kind of sucks or is not fun to play against.
  • Thirdly, the helper ape has to be set before starting the game and can’t be changed. Since you don’t know how they play when you start the game, I sure hope you picked a good helper at random, or it’s going to be a long wait…

Hate

• The Minigames – Gameplay-wise, hate may be a bit of a strong word to describe the minigames in Pumped & Primed. They’re mostly just mediocre, bog standard stuff. However, I’ve got a couple big issues that tip this into the “Hate” section:
  • First of all, there’s no flair to any of these minigames. They’re all just generic party game material, there’s nothing uniquely “Ape Escape” about how they play (eg, why are we never trying to catch apes or other players?).
  • Then there’s the fact that there’s only like a dozen minigames that you’re cycling between for most of the run… however, that is actually a generous estimation, because these ultimately boil down to gadget-specific versions of only three minigame types: elimination, race, and coin collecting. Sure, there’s a bit of variety between those three types (especially when you get to the back-half and start playing cooperative PVE minigames), but you will be repeating game types before long.
  • Making matters worse, in order to progress, you need to hit a score threshold in order to advance. In the initial tournament, you play in chunks of four minigames, of which you will need to come in first or second place in all of them in order to advance. If you fail, then you have to replay all four games again. As you would expect, this just makes the game’s annoying, repetitive gameplay all the more frustrating.
• Gadget Variety – Ape Escape is as much known for its creative gadgets as it is its ape-catching gameplay. Pumped & Primed brings back most of the most well-liked gadgets from the first game: the stun club, slingback shooter, super-hoop, sky flyer, and RC car. The problem is though that it feels like they stopped way too short: where’s the monkey radar and the time net? Surely these could have been implemented for some additional minigame variety and to actually make this feel like an Ape Escape game!
  • Also worth noting that, in the latter half of a run, you will get to choose your gadget loadout. This would be cooler if there was actually some variety: as-is, you only have to leave one gadget behind, so there’s not much room for expression or variety.
• The Camera – Most of the minigames use a zoomed out, isometric camera. IT SUCKS. This camera has a very narrow field of view, which causes the lower-half of the screen to effectively shows you less of what’s ahead than the upper half of the screen does. However, it is also very zoomed out, so you lose track of your character in the chaos constantly. Even if you can see them, the camera angle makes it difficult to judge distances. There were multiple occasions where I would fall to my death, respawn, and then instantly fall again because I couldn’t tell where my character was going to end up. I would have preferred if the game used a side-on or from-behind camera angle, or if it just did split-screen instead.
• AI Rubber-banding – Perhaps the most annoying aspect of Pumped & Primed surfaces if you’re playing a single-player campaign. Go into any free-for-all and you’ll soon find that every enemy is mindlessly on your ass. Sometimes, this can work to your benefit (such as the all-gadgets matches), but it can also make some minigame types extremely difficult (the slingback shooter and submarine battle minigames are particularly aggravating due to the AI being ridiculously more reactive than you).
• It’s Just Way Too Fucking Long – There’s a reason why Mario Party games are only meant to last for an hour or two at most per run, because this sort of gameplay does not hold up over a long play session. And that’s for Mario Party, where you’ve got dozens of unique and creative minigames, to the point where it will take you several playthroughs to see them all. Pumped & Primed on the other hand, has a very limited and repetitive minigame selection and it goes on for what feels like forever.
  • First of all, the main tournament itself is twenty five rounds long, with each minigame taking between one-to-five minutes to complete (and this isn’t even including the boss battles). God forbid you fail to reach any of the score thresholds, or you’ll have to replay a sizeable chunk of dull gameplay.
  • Then there’s the second half of the run, which turns the game from a competitive, free-for-all tournament into a cooperative PVE party game. Unfortunately, this does not change up the gameplay all that meaningfully (in fact, it makes it worse, because it often turns into a frustrating bullet hell, and the race modes are slow and drawn out), and it makes the game drag on longer and longer. I kept thinking “surely the game’s about to end” after I played through twelve of these PVE levels. I looked up a longplay to see how close to the end I was and, to my shock and horror, there was still nearly an hour to go and plenty of minigames to churn through. At that point, I said “fuck it, I’m done”.

I was having a miserable time with Pumped & Primed. If I was playing this with my three brothers back in 2004, we probably would have had a good time and plenty of shenanigans to go around. But, from a more objective standpoint, the game is just kind of mediocre at best. In particular, the limited selection of minigames gets very repetitive, there’s nothing uniquely “Ape Escape” about the minigames, and runs go on for far too long. I just don’t understand what Sony was doing with this franchise in the 2000s. Why did we get so many of these spin-off games that completely ditched the things that made the first game a classic?

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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