So you get dealt cards with a rock, paper or scissors icon on it and if you beat the opposing ape’s card then you get a chance to chip away at its stamina by playing and hopefully winning a mini-game. Win the game, defeat the monkey and you win more cards, money and bananas. The money you can spend on buying more cards to help you win the rock, paper, scissors game but there is nothing that can help to get a decisive victory in the mini-games bar your own podgy fingers.

The mini-games come in many flavours of irritating. Sometimes you have to bat baseballs passed an ape-catcher, other times the roles are reversed and you have to catch the balls! Then there’s the one where you have to saw a tree down, another where you catch falling bananas, pull a rope to drop a bath on an ape’s head, shoot apes, avoid lasers, avoid searchlights, avoid getting shot… there are a lot of these games. But perhaps ‘game’ is too strong a word, since no one has any sort of fun playing them. Especially when they start repeating very quickly.

We didn’t like Ape Academy 2 and find it very difficult to imagine that anyone else would. Of course some people might pretend to like it, but we haven’t taken that into account.

Tim Empey