‘Ape Out’ Is A Beastly Action Game That You’ll Want To Monkey Around With

When it comes to jazz, you gotta have style, baby. A whole lot of it. If you think you’re going to wow anyone without oozing style out of every pore, you’ve got it all wrong. Ever seen Cowboy Bebop? Listened to a Miles Davis album? Now you’re on the right track.

Ape Out is the coolest of the cool, that record rife with blasting trumpets, sassy drum beats, and nonsensical noise that you find throughout a critically-acclaimed jazz record. It’s unrestrained. Powerful. Unyielding. And while it may be frustrating sometimes, you can’t wait to play it again and again until you wear the record out.

How does it accomplish all that when it’s about unleashing a gorilla on a set of unsuspecting researchers, scientists, and whoever else was unlucky enough to come to work that day? It’s all in the escape from, well, wherever it happens to be at the current time. Trust me on this.

Like a Saul Bass joint come to life, or at the very least the most stylistically impressive episode of Sheep in the Big City adopting a TV MA rating and breaking its characters backs amidst a rush of colour, Ape Out is tempered insanity with an adrenaline rush of visuals. The rooms you find yourself confined to at first are textured, the gorilla itself a bright, menacing orange, and enemies a dull grey and black because who cares? They’re gonna die anyway – at least, that’s the message the game sends.

It’s mostly abstract, though. Sure, you can see the blood splattering all over the walls of wherever your gorilla avatar is trapped at the time, and the mess you make when you toss the body of a soldier into the wall and watch their lifeless corpse slide down. And it could also be a bunch of blobs in a modernist painting! Who knows? (It’s not a modernist painting. But it could be.)

Perhaps part of what makes Ape Out such a thrilling, visceral experience is that there’s no pretence, no plot to keep of – not really. You’re simply an ape, an ape who intensely dislikes being held against its will, and thus he’s compelled to escape from any and every holding cell his captors see fit to confine him to.

That’s a terrible idea, because this primate harnesses an incredible amount of strength and has zero qualms with making a meat sandwich out of bad guys or throwing them across the room after absorbing enemy fire, using them as human shields. It all culminates in a violent, cacophonous display of power. Power that you’re immediately glad it’s you who wields and not the other way around.

The various escapes, played via isometric view, play out in quick succession one after another. If you’ve ever enjoyed a twin-stick shooter like that of Nex Machine or Enter the Gungeon, you’ll feel immediately at home here. Keep both hands on the “trigger,” so to speak, and you’ll be prepared for anything, as long as the rage continues to flow through you endlessly.

There are a seemingly endless stream of enemies advancing toward you at any given moment, each toting guns that you could totally tear through their defences with should they drop them. But you’re an ape. You can’t pick up and use guns. No matter, because the humans can. So you can pick up the gangly, puny beings and simply aim at their friends for a ballet of bullets. If that doesn’t work, you can go on the offensive and shield yourself from the oncoming hail of gunfire coming your way. All this, while decorating the level as if it were a Jackson Pollock painting. It’s thrilling, and hard to step away from. Most importantly, it’s wild.

When you swing your fists and they crash into the poor sods they happen to connect with, the screen shakes violently. It effectively communicates your ape’s brute strength more so than any detailed models ever could, and it feels fantastic.

However you choose to play, you’ve got to keep a close eye on your ape’s health. Take damage three times, and the veritable rampage is over. Even deaths are aesthetically pleasing, though, with enormous font that proclaims you’re “DEAD” as you start over again from your last checkpoint.

There’s more to the killing than methodical mayhem, though. Each kill you rack up cues up a clashing cymbal, a bongo beat you want to jump out of your seat and shake what your mama gave you to. In many ways, it resembles elements of a rhythm game deconstructed and reconstituted into something bloodier, rougher, and primal. You don’t dance to the music so much as you massacre, and it’s all the better for it.

‘Ape Out’ is an exciting prospect, half art project and half shooter with deceptively simple mechanics.

Unfortunately, the experience comes to a swift end a lot sooner than it should. The game is content to jump up and down like that of an unruly simian right in your face for a few hours, and then silently saunter away, as if ignoring the enormous commotion and massive bloodbath it just thrust upon you. Like that, it’s over. And immediately, you want to tackle it again.

Though Ape Out is a powerhouse you’ll burn through quickly, it still retains a startling amount of replay value. The levels are procedurally-generated, which means it’s technically a different kind of experience each time you jump back in for more. So there’s no point in making an attempt at remembering where all your prey is hiding or how to take them out.

There’ll just be more of them in different places next time. And if that doesn’t present enough of a challenge for you, you can always go through it again on harder difficulties – if you don’t feel like tooling around with simpler enemies, however.

Ape Out is an exciting prospect, half art project and half shooter with deceptively simple mechanics. It’s a chaotic mixture of paint strewn along the studio walls, a musician toot-toot-tooting his horn in an atonal frenzy along to the record spinning on the record player in the corner of a vintage shop, and the unbridled rage of an animal in captivity who knows it doesn’t belong. It’s brutal, boisterous, and bloody – and well worth the admission…as long as you’re cool enough, anyway.