Super Monkey Ball has been around for a few years now on various systems and the series has for the most part remained the same; you tilt a floating platform around in an effort to maneuver a transparent ball with a monkey inside around the level without dropping him or her off the edge. The concept was simple, but it worked beautifully, largely in part to some challenging and often ingenious level designs.

Somebody at SEGA decided they've had enough of all this monkeying around, though, because Super Monkey Ball Adventure moves the setting from floating platforms to huge, open worlds where players roll their monkeys around (this time you move the monkey ball through direct control rather than level-tilting) and look for characters in distress, solving multiple puzzles and performing elaborate platform jumping. Here and there you will also discover bonus mini-games that play out exactly like the levels of Monkey Ball games past, but they don't play a large any more.

The concept is solid - you will travel from a forest like Monkey Island to Monkeytropolis, a brightly lit cityscape, with some underwater and industrialized worlds tossed into the mix for good measure. The problem, is the game simply doesn't play very well, soon becoming extremely difficult and murder-inducingly frustrating, all unintentionally. I knew as soon as I discovered that you couldn't adjust the invert for the camera that Monkey Ball Adventure was bad news! You're forced to adjust to the camera system, which is so bad that it should become the poster-child for terrible camera engines for all game developers to study and not replicate. You often can't see where you're going and by the time you position the camera to see, it's too late - there isn't even an option to center the camera behind your monkey instantly, to make things a bit easier. It's as if the game completely ignores every advancement in videogame camera design over the last five years or more!

Because of this, moving the ball simply becomes anything but fun, and considering a very large portion of the gameplay (read: all of it) revolves around rolling a ball with a monkey in it, the game itself is an experience of anger, frustration and wishing you'd never gotten started. If you can get over the camera, which is unlikely, you won't find much to enjoy anyway; the challenges you must hunt down across the worlds are mundane tasks, like finding another monkey who's hiding, collecting various items and bringing them back, or just helping out other monkeys for no particular reason. One nice feature is the numerous power-ups that can be purchased from stores, making your journey a little bit more enjoyable and varied, but unfortunately there's no 'camera-that-isn't-completely-useless' power-up to unlock.

One plus point is that the worlds at least look cool and have some nice designs, although they're not exactly original. Unfortunately, finding your way around them isn't nearly as nice - you often find yourself getting lost after falling off a small ledge that you're expected to navigate over and over just to get to another section of the world, and have to tediously navigate your ball back up to wherever you were just to initiate a specific challenge or simply get to the right area to find the challenge.

The main story mode just doesn't work here - it's easy to see why the developers wanted to branch off, but this game engine is simply not suited for it; it's full of old technology, complete with a horrible camera engine and no means of improving it at all (and this includes the lack of any ability to change the sensitivity too!) I know you're thinking that it can't be as bad as it sounds, but I'll tell you now I was very much looking forward to this new direction for the series before I played the game, to the point where I specifically picked this for review. My mistake!

Speaking of sound, this doesn't impress very much either; all of the monkey characters sound the same and repeat the same jibba-jabba over and over whenever they speak, accompanied by subtitles. I don't expect the monkeys to speak English, but I expect them to at least not all sound like a little girl monkey and I also expect all the words in their language to not sound the same.

The most redeeming element of Super Monkey Ball Adventure is what lies outside of the main story mode - a classic selection of puzzles can be unlocked and played through, just like the original Super Monkey Ball (which our editor loves if I seem to recall!), as well as a nice, albeit familiar selection of party games to play with your friend (yep, doesn't even support more than two players on PS2!).

By now you hopefully realize that Super Monkey Ball Adventure is one to steer clear of; even Monkey Ball vets (as in veterans, not veterinarians!) would be better suited looking at something like Marble Blast Ultra on Xbox 360 Arcade or Mercury Meltdown on PSP or PS2 (the Remixed edition!) With a very unsteady camera, a sleep-inducing story mode and no means of customizing the camera to your liking, this game takes the series in perhaps the right direction, but it's taken on too much and simply rolled off the edge, plummeting to certain doom below!

Reviewed by Christopher Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).