Ape Escape has a very strange premise. Monkeys have escaped from a zoo lead by their smartest ape, Spector. They’ve broken into a local scientist's lab and gone back in time to reshape history. Their plan is to make it so humans either never exist or become the eternal slaves of apes in the future. To do this they must influence and change the political structure of the world in each of the eras of man. You play Spike who must go back in time as well and capture all the apes before something disastrous occurs.

As mentioned in the my first impressions article and my preview, the main draw to Ape Escape’s uniqueness is that it requires and fully utilizes the Dual Shock controller. Combining the two analog buttons with built-in rumble support, the Dual Shock has had the potential to revolutionize how we control gaming, but no game had yet to exploit it. Ape Escape is that first step. The developers looked for every conceivable chance to force players to use both analogs in unison and this is what keeps the game fresh and challenging. There’s always going to be a time where the player will have to learn a new way of controlling the character, device, or vehicle.

A few examples of this in action is during a sequence where you must cross a body of water with a giant sea creature blowing electricity from its mouth. To get across without being damaged the player must use a boat the scientist has provided. To control the left oar you rotate the left analog, and to control the right oar you have to rotate the right analog. By moving them both in the same direction at the same time you can move fairly smoothly forward and back. Another instance where this comes into play is during a tank sequence where the left analog controls the left wheel, while the right analog controls the other.

One of the problems with the control is that it’s hard to get it to go straight and I always would end up sliding left or right. It would have been easier had the way the turning was handled been tweaked a little.

The visuals in Ape Escape are some of the best seen yet on the PlayStation. It’s easy to tell that this is probably almost as good as platformers are going to look on the current PlayStation. There is an insane amount of texture variety and the animation is smooth as silk. This is mostly bogged down, however, by the fact that the frame-rate jumps from ultra smooth to choppy when running into a large area with many enemies.

While the point of the game is to capture many apes, that can’t be done unless you have the tools to do so. That’s where the gadgets in the game come in. Your friendly scientist fellow will give you a lightsaber-type weapon to whack and kill enemies with and a catching net in the very beginning of the game. As time passes and progression through the game’s levels takes place new gadgets will be placed in the inventory. Other gadgets that can be discovered are an RC Car to squeeze into small places, a monkey radar (probably the coolest gadget) to find the path toward monkeys to capture, and a small circular tube that goes around the waist of Spike and, when spun, it makes him run faster and be invincible for a short period of time.