Monkey King: Hero Is Back Review

Monkey King: Hero Is Back an adaption of the 2015 Chinese animated movie of the same name, based on the Chinese legend Journey To The West by Wu Cheng’en. The story begins as a young boy named Liuer accidentally awakens Sun Wukong, also known here as Dasheng, from his crystal prison. Dasheng was once an all-powerful monkey king who went around annoying the gods like some form of furry Kratos, until one day Buddha had enough of his nonsense and imprisoned him. Dasheng awakens just a martial arts monkey, his powers still sealed by Buddha, set with the task of doing good deeds to unshackle his powers and once again become the monkey king.

Our journey sees this interpretation of Sun Wukong, essentially Murdoc from the band Gorillaz, on a quest to save “the children” from monsters and the evil lord who controls them. Joined by Lieur, Pigsy and a baby named An-An, Dasheng is typically annoyed into being the good guy as a way to get everyone else in the party to essentially shut up and leave him alone. This makes Dasheng the only character in the game that isn’t incredibly irritating and naturally relatable to any grumpy old men who happen to experience this story.

This irritation however seems to be the only thing that transfers to game-play as both Lieur and Pigsy will run around screaming “MONSTERS” at every single sign of the frog faced creatures that inhabit this world. This happens so often that I would recommend turning the sound off unless you’re particularly inclined to clawing your own ears out.

Monkey King: Hero Is Back is an action platformer taking cues from games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and is more on the action side of the genre. You follow a linear path and brawl your way through endless supplies of multicoloured enemy types. These vary from the usual frog type monster to monkey ninjas and floating jellyfish who steal your magic powers and life, but there really aren’t many more than these three types of basic enemies. You will also come across a haunted armour type enemy that requires you to complete a gameplay loop of waiting for its attack, punishing it and eventually hammering the attack button in a quick-time event-esque system that goes on far too long and happens far too often. The boss battles can also be written off as uninteresting. Earlier bosses become common enemies while later bosses enjoy floating just outside of your field of vision for long periods of time while throwing lasers at you. The final boss is even more obnoxious in regards to doing this as he decides to waste your time by flying up to the top of a building only to go all the way back down when you reach the top.

This game loves transition scenes. Almost every time you need to interact with the environment in some way, such as entering a building or using a ladder, it forces you to watch a short transition scene of Dasheng climbing the ladder or opening the door, seemingly included only to mask the game’s already lengthy loading screens. What is presented to us as a 10 hour game could be cut in half quite easily due to the repetition and amount of unnecessary stuff filling each moment. As well as the transition scenes we have areas which rely on repeating the same puzzle multiple times, a section identical to Devil May Cry’s Bloody Palace mode and a boss rush area right before the final boss, all of which are unskippable and go on for much longer than is even sane.

What’s frustrating though is that there is potential for fun within the game’s combat. At first I didn’t like the way Dasheng seemingly skates clumsily across the environment, but it was sometime during the Bloody Palace area where I started to gel with the combat system and enjoy taking on the standard enemies, countering their attacks and using the objects strewn around the arena. You only really have a light and heavy attack option, but these are either too weak or too slow for you to treat it like a hack and slash action game. When you realise that you should be taking a slower approach to the combat, using the purge counter attack action to kill enemies in one hit, as opposed to throwing random attacks at everything, it becomes much more enjoyable. However playing in this way highlights how simplistic the enemies are, having perhaps only one or two types of attack per creature.

The same potential permeates throughout the adventure: the game is visually pleasing, incredibly well animated and even well acted in places. The basics of a good game are here but it doesn’t seem as if the team at Oasis Games had either the ambition to design more creative levels or the budget to provide a more engaging narrative experience, which seeps through to the way the story is told, mostly through still frames of 3D models.