Price: £34.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes Online: No Multiplayer between PSPs: Yes Ape Escape P is the first tranisition to the Sony PSP for a franchise borne out on the usual Sony consoles and sees you as Spike, friend of the Professor who has a problem. A mischevious monkey named Specter has not only stolen the Prof's Peak Point helmet, which can increase a human's intelligence, but he's also mis-used the man's latest device, a time machine, to go back to the past and create chaos with it there instead. However, Specter didn't just go back by himself but also took hundreds of monkeys from the zoo, and given our cheeky monkey the will to be a power-hungry megalomaniac and take over the world. Obviously, as Spike, you've got to put a stop to this. The opening segment takes a long time to play through, and can't be skipped past when it's getting tedious. We do get to the game eventually though, and level one sees you having to catch three monkeys with your 'time net', or use your sword to bash some other obscure creature over the head at which point they turn into cookies to boost your health or bonus points.

It's not massively difficult once you get the hang of it as the monkeys stop moving and wave their arms at you as you approach, giving you enough time to cast your net and capture them. All other levels are pretty much the same with a few variations as you have to entrap over 200 monkeys spread throughout 8 worlds and over 20 levels with gadgets such as the Monkey Rader and RC Car, even going underwater to catch the ones with a net who are trying to escape. For those wanting a bit more, you can use the PSP's wireless Ad Hoc connectivity mode to enables gamers in close proximity to utilize the multiplayer mode and play a variety of mini-games with friends. Such add-ons include variants of snowboarding, boxing, racing and Ping Pong.

There's very good sonic placement in the stereo output to help you determine precisely where a monkey is if it's in the vicinity jumping about and you need to turn to track him down. The graphics are crisp and colourful which will aid the appeal to kids, but like the aspect of what you have to do, they are undemanding. There's been hundreds of games like this over the last few years where you run about over a 3D landscape with your character able to turn the full 360o and while this game does it just as good as all the others, you have to ask yourself if it's worth a purchase given that you've seen it all before. In fact, since 1996's original Tomb Raider release, this has to be one of the most frequently-used game engines in recent times, particularly in kids games.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2006.