This is one of those games that you love to hate and hate to love. Its cute. Relatively fun. Has plenty of replay. The problem is, just like the Wii, the controls can be insanely difficult. Monkey Ball has historically been a ridiculously hard, mind numbingly curse-out-the-TV game. For being a title aimed at the casual gamer, Super Monkey Ball is frustratingly difficult. The iPhone version does not fail to continue this legacy.
This really could have been a great launch title. It has certainly sold well enough and garnered plenty of praise, but we think that most people have been blinded by the novelty of seeing good 3d graphics on something that used to only play Bejewelled. You guide your monkey ball through an assortment of 3d scenes ? from swaying platforms to narrow paths.
Make one misstep and you fall off. Unfortunately, the accelerometer needs some serious tuning and Sega needs to remember that casual gamer don't find frustration fun. Super Monkey Ball really had big potential. They could have finally worked on play balancing. The accelerometer could have been tuned more. Most importantly, they could have enabled auto-saving after every level, not every ten.
We can only imagine the amount of thrown and broken phone screens this game has generated. All in all, decent game to pick up, but for $9.99 it has some fatal flaws that make this game a solid choice only for experienced (and patient) gamers.