In a bleak future where mankind has been exterminated from the folly of creating a perpetual motion machine and monkeys are now seemingly infinite... Never in a million years did I think I would start a review with those words but that is now the case in the new game from Size Five Games, Gun Monkeys.
You run a power company in the future, staffed by monkeys toting guns, which could very well be where the game gets it's title from. Through the course of the game you collect little blue power cubes, up to three at a time, and you have to transport them back to your base to send them to the past to power all the appliances that modern day living says we need: kettles, TVs, computers etc.
The gameplay is easy to grasp but seems like it will be tricky to master, in my 3 games I have around 11 kills and 7 or so deaths but I have yet to win a game, finding the balance between killing the opposing monkey and collecting energy cubes is something I, as of yet, have been unable to do.
Above I mentioned an opposing monkey, this game is a 1v1 arena shooter, you on one side, your opponent on the other and energy cubes spawning to be collected at random intervals, to be returned to the players respective energy core. As well as the energy cubes the player is given power ups: stronger weapons, attraction of energy cubes and the like. This makes for some interesting gameplay scenarios.
From the moment I played the tutorial of this game, I was hooked on it. The humour brought to the narration by Kevin Eldon is masterful to say the least. I asked Dan (the developer of Gun Monkeys) why Kevin Eldon was chosen and his response was "Kevin Eldon is a hero of mine, he was just hugely influential on me. When it came to getting the voiceover done, I chanced my arm and sent him an email; he's not a gamer but liked the look of the game, it all just went from there. He is a very lovely, friendly man. It was amazing to work with him!"
What more do you need than that? Kevin Eldon has been in some of my favourite TV shows of all time, shows such as The IT Crowd, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Green Wing, Nighty Night and Black Books and every time I have seen or heard him, I have cracked up. Gun Monkeys is no different.
The music in Gun Monkeys is another strong point, fitting the action on screen perfectly and not at all jarring.
I pried for information about the game's development from Dan, being curious as to how the game formed the way it did. His response "OK. So, the game started out years ago as a silly game called Gibbage. It was local-only, 2 player 1 on 1. It was just incredibly good fun - the core mechanic of trying to grab cubes and return them to your base without dying just worked really well. When I had an opportunity to make something small in Unity, it seemed like a good concept to revisit, only this time I could make it online! The 1 on 1 thing stuck because that's what I knew worked- any more than that and Id need to invest in some serious prototyping, so I deliberately kept the project's scope small and manageable, but expandable if the game took off"
The one problem I can foresee with Gun Monkeys is will the one game mode be enough to keep most players invested? It's not a problem for me in the slightest because it is such a fun game mode, not too hectic but hectic enough that you will end up blowing yourself up more than once (at least 3 of my deaths were from my own bombs.)
Gun Monkeys is great fun and well deserving of your time and money, especially if watching multi-coloured virtual monkeys explode into gore is your thing. You can find Gun Monkeys on Steam
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