Developer/Publisher: Streaming Colour Studios
Genre: Path Management
Price: $0.99
Acquired: Pre-Release Review Copy Provided
Verdict: A unique and extremely fun take on the path management genre
Pros: Fun gameplay; multiple playable maps; OpenFeint integration with a variety of leaderboards available
Cons: Um, I don’t really have anything. Not much to complain about here.

On the iPhone, games have to evolve or die. If you want to stand out, you can’t just sit there and duplicate what other games have done. When I hear about the next marginally different match-3 or word game, I usually weep at the resulting blandness. On a platform where you can do so much, doing so little is disappointing. What’s not disappointing is the exceedingly-lengthily-titled Monkeys in Space: Escape to Banana Base Alpha. No, this evolution in the path management genre is not disappointing. One may even say that it is quite entertaining.

Monkeys in Space is at its heart a path management game – there are red and yellow monkeys floating around in space, and you must get them to the space stations of their respective color without colliding monkeys at all, because monkeys should only be collided by trained professionals. Also, who’s heard of a red monkey  in a yellow space station? Surely you jest, sir. At its very core, it’s like Flight Control or Harbor Master, sure. This game, however, differs across two key gameplay elements – one, instead of drawing some convoluted path to the space station from the monkeys,  a tractor beam (straight line)  can be used to pull them in to the space station, or even to just redirect their movement. Gameplay twist #2? The chaining system. See, each monkey individually pulled in to a space station is  worth one point. However, you can connect monkeys together, and pull them into space stations in chains, where each monkey in the chain adds an additional point to its value, meaning that the total value of a chain can be addressed as a simple arithmetic series of .5n*(n+1)  where n is the number of monkeys. So 5 monkeys = .5(5)**(5+1)=2.5*6=15 points. There’s your math lesson for the day. In practice, it will make far more sense than my math geekery just did.

These two major gameplay elements radically change the way the game plays from other path management games. With only straight paths available, you have to be far more active and careful  in where  you send your monkeys, especially in levels where there are hazards like floating asteroids to keep your monkeys from reaching their space stations safe and sound. The chaining is also key, as not only do they help you increase your score quickly, but also, monkeys that are chained together can touch each other, so if two get close, you may want to quickly chain them to save your monkey bacon. I imagine monkey bacon wouldn’t taste that good. However, you don’t just want to chain a bunch of monkeys and leave them out  in the middle of space – a huge cluster of monkeys is a bigger target for non-chained and opposite-colored monkeys to make your game end tragically short, like the career of Kurt Cobain, before Activision symbolically violated his memory 15 years later.

There’s a great uniqueness and depth to the game: it gives players an option to either play conservatively and rack up points by playing for a long time, or take the highway to the danger zone and rack up huge chains, but risk ending it all on a stray monkey (isn’t that how it usually happens?) that doesn’t have any respect for your monkey-chaining endeavors. You’re only trying to advance monkey-kind, why does that monkey have to ruin you in his own little monkey way? A sad day for monkey transportation indeed.But, I digress.

There are 3 different level maps – Deep Space, where things are relatively normal for a game about monkeys floating around in space, Planetary Chaos, which has a planet that the space stations revolve around, with gravity that the monkeys can get pulled into, and  Asteroids! which has a couple of large asteroids revolving around  the space stations to make things just that much more difficult. Each map presents its own rewards and challenges, requiring you to adjust your strategies accordingly  for what each level brings. For example, Planetary Chaos helps with chains, as you can make chains that stick into the middle, and just send other monkeys to their base by themselves as a huge chain develops in the planet’s gravity. In Asteroids!,  however, if a monkey collides with an asteroid, it’s the end of the line for you and your monkeys. My lowest scores are on the Asteroids! map, by far.

Monkeys in Space is just awesome. It takes a known genre and expands on it with style and its own elements to make it nothing like what has come before it. There’s even great OpenFeint support, with a myriad of leaderboards available to show off your various Monkeys in Space skills. The game is only $0.99 with plenty of gameplay behind it, and you’re supporting an indie developer with a high-quality product. Want to know how highly I recommend this game? On Thanksgiving, when this game was released, it was the first game I recommended to iPhone-owning family members. Also, despite having a free pre-release review build provided, I bought the game on the App Store, because it is great, and indie developers making high-quality products deserve the support. You should do the same.