Monkey King: Hero is Back may have been released in 2019 but it really feels at home in the PlayStation 2 era. Monkey King is filled with an abundance of loading screens, repetitive and bland combat, a fractured story, window dressing abilities and some truly tedious padding that makes the latter half of the game a slog.

I was able to complete Monkey Kings‘ “story” in about six hours, and at first, I was taking my time. Around the two and a half hour mark of slinking through the linear towns and caves for hidden items and collectibles, I felt like I was wasting my time.

Monkey Kings’ story feels like a “best of” retelling of the movie. You start the game as the titular Monkey King waking up from a 500-year imprisonment, stripped of all your powers and Su Wukong must (as instructed by the goddess) “do good” to return to his former glory.

The writing and dialogue tends to be quite weak here, with characters repeating the same information to the player multiple times in the same cutscene; beating you over the head with “how you must save the kids to redeem yourself.” it also keeps pointing players in the right direction as soon as they travel off the beaten path. This makes exploring for items so frustrating that at times I could only play in 30-40 minute chunks every few hours just to ensure I could pick it up again later in the day and not give up entirely on Monkey King.

Monkey King centers around three main characters and each starts and ends as just plain unlikeable. Su Wukong is boring as he barely speaks and when he does, he insults his companions. Liure is so irritating that I just wanted him to disappear without a trace. His high pitched voice hurt my ears and he wouldn’t stop talking in the early moments of the game. Then there is Zhu Bajie who seems to have some problem with Su, though it is never more than mentioned and only once.

Characters arcs tend to be rushed and sidelined. As you start the game Su Wukong downright ignores Luire and Zhu, yet only a few short hours later he wants to be best buds and plays along with their shenanigans, everything feels forced and undeserved.

The annoying characters were not the only thing that hampered my overall enjoyment of the game. The boring and repetitive combat made Monkey King feel about ten times longer than it actually was. Su Wukong only has about three battle animations, and even though you can upgrade his combos by finding Earth gods, I couldn’t tell any difference and never felt any more powerful.

There is also an upgrade tree that unlocks abilities as you progress through the story. Most of these powers, however, are pretty useless as one puts you in a painfully slow animation where you summon a bench, and another makes you stand still to unleash a flurry of kicks leaving you vulnerable for enemy counter-attacks. Each power is upgradeable but alas it is all just more window dressing that doesn’t make the player feel any more like a powerful god. To be honest, I could never get a sense of progression through these so-called “upgrades”.

Enemy design is also lacking, throughout the game I came across a handful of different enemy types. The most common enemy were these gremlin type creatures that sounded like a 5-year-old trying to be a lion, as well as color swaps of the same creature over and over again. The same goes for the rest of the small roster of creatures. The enemy A.I. was incredibly dull too. If you were wanting to stealth your way through an area and you were spotted, all you had to was walk a bit outside their cone of vision and they’d forget all about you. At times the A.I. would even stand still or attack walls instead of me.

Monkey King feels like an early generation PlayStation 2 game. To boot up the game you have to sit through 20-30 seconds of loading, then if you want to enter any building you have to sit though another loading screen to enter and exit. There are even open areas that cut you off with a loading screen and you can see the other side of the area. It all adds an extra layer of monotony.

To add to this feeling of monotony you will also have to endure an insane amount of backtracking. During the late game, the developers found it necessary to make the items you need to create healing potions extremely limited so that you would have to visit earlier areas to stock up on these items. Thankfully because the game isn’t too difficult I didn’t have to do for long.

The padding never ends with Monkey King either; when I got halfway through the game decided that I had to go through combat trials that lasted way to long. Later on, I found myself re-fighting the same old boring and repetitive boss encounters. Some bosses are even recycled three times with just a small color change.

Monkey King: Hero is Back is not worth anyone’s hard-earned cash or precious time. I couldn’t even recommend it for a younger audience, as the combat is simple and the characters are very flat. They have such a jarring and poorly written arcs it would make you think that half the game is missing. Monkey King may have looks going for it, but the poor story, badly written dialogue and laughably brain dead A.I. makes this title a slog and a chore.

A PS4 Review Copy of Monkey King: Hero is Back was provided by THQ Nordic for this Review.

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39.99

4

Score

4.0/10

Pros

• Eye popping colors

Cons

• Poor writing
• Bland Combat
• Frequent loading