Product Description

With brain-power enhanced, modesty covered--and resplendent in a series of ever-more bizarre costumes--the evil Specter's anarchic apes are off on the rampage once more in Ape Escape 2. Dash around the world sorting out the primate problem with the help of a range of monkey-catching gadgets including water pistols, clubs, hoops and nets, and a superb new banana boomerang. You'll visit a range of exotic locations, like a Shaolin temple, a beach resort and even a moon base, and in every one you'll find unhelpfully perky primates with more tricks up their sleeves than ever. To deal with them, you'll need to drive tanks and snowmobiles, pilot submarines and boats and even use your own robot for full-on robot fighting.

A Gotcha Box opens up sub-games and gives you hints, tips and items that will help you in the main game and give you access to mini-games including Monkey Football, Dancing Bong, and Monkey Tightrope, as well as a variety of other game features. There are 20 huge and beautifully designed levels, as well as eight boss levels, just in the first cycle of play: once you finish the first cycle, you play through the entire game again with new areas to explore and new weapons to help you. A Time Attack mode lets you pit your skills on any single level, and once you've finished the second cycle you can even play all over again as Spike, the hero from the first Ape Escape game. What's more, there's a two-player game that lets you demonstrate your superior monkey-catching skills over and over again.

An enormous, immersive and beautifully designed game that's gloriously unhinged, Ape Escape 2 has great graphics, and massive helpings of fast-paced, original, and frankly sometimes just plain bizarre, gameplay. Every bit as crazy as the original game, it's the most fun you can have with a monkey with its pants on.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8093 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2003-03-14
• Platform: PlayStation2

Amazon.co.uk Review
Talk about a match made in heaven: video games and monkeys go together like students and money-off vouchers. Ape Escape 2 not only features mountains of simians, it's also stacked to the gills with cool platform action and general Japanese craziness.

The original Ape Escape was the first PlayStation game to demand use of the then new Dualshock analogue controller as you battled through time, capturing monkeys with the aid of a variety of unlikely James-Bond-style gadgets. This PS2 sequel is more of the same, opening with the accidental distribution of intelligence-boosting helmets along with special monkey pants. (Whether the game actually means underpants or trousers is never made clear and so you never know whether the peculiar dialogue is meant to be preposterously rude or just sounds that way to British ears.)

The nonsense never gives up as you get to operate a monkey radar, use a remote control car to press switches and fling specially scented banana-rangs. And you really do need all these gadgets and more, since the monkeys are always hidden in the most inaccessible areas of the many levels, with most able to defend themselves with everything from monkey kung fu to guided missiles. Although the game really does nothing different from its predecessor--even the level settings are disappointingly familiar--the addictive gameplay and immense variety ensure that all but the most cynical hearts will find something to enjoy here. --David Jenkins

Official PlayStation 2 Magazine
"This riotous paintbox of baboonery is likely to bring out the gurgling proto-human in you."

Edge
"Ape Escape 2's primary objective is to entertain. On those terms, it's almost a masterpiece."

Customer Reviews

An Exception....
Normally, i wouldn't be seen dead playing an platform game. Im a 13 year old boy!!! I like violence!!! I like football!!! I like anime!!! Only 6 year olds like platform games, right!! Right??

When the original Ape Escape came out, i was 8. It ROCKED. However, i rented it twice, completed it, and never bought it. As I grew older, my tastes in video games swayed from Crash Bandicoot to Metal Gear Solid, from smiling orange creature to a man with a mullet the size of Chichester. I liked GUNS! BLOOD! PLOT TWISTS!

And then this came out. I thought, "hmmmmm..... ill give it a go," but my concience told me, "BUY IT! BUY IT! BUYBUYBUYBUY!"
The next thing I knew, i was in Woolworths, handing 40 quid over the counter with the game in my hands. "AAAAAHHHHH!" I thought, if my friends find out about this, i'm doomed! DOOMED!!!

And then I played it. It was like being reunited with an old friend, and i loved it. Ape Escape is a game where you must catch monkeys with a net, using other various gadgets and playing mini games along the way. The game uses both analog sticks, left for movement, right for using the gadget. (Get it and you'll see.. trust me.) It was more of the same old game i loved 5 years ago, which is its only downside. Lots of people wanted so much more, but its really more of the same. I personaly dont care, but many do.

I decided to throw a quick remark in at school. "IVE GOT APE ESCAPE 2!!" Uh-oh, I thought, why did i just do that? "Ape Escape 2? Sweet! Dude, u gotta let me play it!" "Uh, ok.."

And like that, ive got 10 friends round my house having a tournement of monkey football. I guess you can go off platform games, but not Ape Escape.

Go Ape!
For Ape Escape, read Ape Escape 2. After a successful start on the PS1, the ever original platformer returns for a second outing, this time on the PS2.
In essence very little has changed at all. The innovative control system that set the series apart from the rest (being the first game soley designed for analogue controllers) has now been copied and although its perfectly laid out, has lost a little bit of its sparkle.
The gameplay has remained very much the same too and to a little bit of dismay, almost every gadget you could you in the PS1 version has been carried over, with very little else added!
However, where things have got better are the graphics, which are colourful, bold and beautiful and the monkey's AI. The stars of the show now really do have human brains. They run, hide, attack, man various weapons, swim, dive, have scent and hunger. Each monkey is individual and you must cater for that.
On top of the main game are some helerious mini games to be found, and endless hidden pieces waiting to be unearthed. This is not a game you'll play for a few hours and then put to one side which is aided by the perfectly paced difficulty curve.
Ape Escape 2 is essentially more of the same, but its completely barmy ways (karaoke monkeys anyone?) will have you hooked from start to finish.

Not Bad, Not amazing
Not having played the original game before I was a little unsure what to expect, I had expected it to be a bit childish. And, well, it is a bit, but its still fun. Ive spent quite a few hours on it, Its got great controls, some nice mini games to distract you from the main game, and the end of level bosses are tricky but not impossible, but the story sux a little. I dont think I would have bought this game, having played it, certainly not for forty squids, but for 20-25, maybe. Tihs is the sort of game a 7-14 year old is gonna love.