Ape Out review: the king of swing (and fling)
A series of playable '50s-inspired jazz albums, where the music is informed by the violent lashings out of an escapee gorilla, Ape Out is a unique and stylishly gruesome work of art that kept me coming back for more.
Each album begins with an ape breaking free of its cage, before rampaging through an environment filled with gun-toting goons. The drums hit and symbol crashes in time with your every charge, swipe and limb-separating bash as you fight to make it through each fast-paced level (from research labs to a cargo ship and beyond) with your life.
The controls are simple but effective, with one shoulder button flinging your enemies (throw them into a wall or each other to explode them into a pool of stark red blood and body parts) and the other shoulder button holding them hostage. You can also use the right stick to rotate your body, which is handy if you're defending yourself from bullets with a meat shield or a door you just ripped off its hinges.
While things start simple, with standard rifle-wielding bad guys, the game gradually builds to include explosives experts, armoured shotgun guys, snipers, cowardly pistol marksmen and more. The top-down perspective has walls cleverly extending from the floor up to the screen, making it tough to see around corners. Taken together with the fact that you can only take three hits before you die, this all means you need to think and destroy on your feet, and more often then not the levels are a mix of reactive violence, luck and improvised strategy.
In fact, although each level has its own themes and concepts, they are randomised save for the occassional choke-point or setpiece, so even if you die multiple times you'll never be able to make it through by memory alone. I generally found that the difficulty was tuned to a degree that I'd die a handful of times on most maps, before grasping the new concepts enough that I could blast through it. Returning to earlier maps bore this out, as I crushed challenges that previously gave me a bit of trouble.
Once you've finished each album, which should only take you a few hours total, you can play them again on hard mode for a challenge that feels much less fair, or run through in the arcade mode which gives you a time limit and keeps a score based on your kills.
There might not be a massive number of levels here, but the whole thing hs such an improvisational, groovy feel to it that I didn't feel to much like I was retreading old ground when I went back to play again. For a start the level layouts shift, but it's the the reactive music that's especially impressive. Running the same level can have an extremely different vibes each time depending on your actions, as the tempo raises during kill sprees and slows downif you take a breather. It really sounds like a drummer translating your brutal actions into music.
Meanwhile the splotchy backgrounds and simple blocked-out characters have a screen-printed feel, and the shimmering animation and constant screen shake fills the whole thing with an energy that matches both the jazz and the violence to a tee. This is a game that looks, feels and sounds amazing in equal measure, and it all combines for an uncomplicated but addictive good time.
Ape Out is out now for Switch (reviewed) and PC.