3.5/5 ★ – TargetPermanent's review of Ape Out.

NOTE: This was written for a publication but never published. Pretty outside of the scope of reviews on this platform, but thought I’d post it anyway. What happens when you channel the improvisational brilliance of Al Foster and the visceral momentum of Hotline Miami? What sort of chaotic mess comes out of such a concoction? You certainly don’t get anything short of great. Ape Out is an action arcade game that hits hard and flies fast. Its simplistic mechanics, tight controls, evocative visual style, and, most of all, its incredibly dynamic sound design are married in such a way as to force the player into alternating defensive and offensive states of mind. Each bout of violent outbursts are capped with stretches of tense quite that the player is forced to desperately navigate through. At any moment, unbeknownst to the player, it could all start again. Thugs and gangsters of a wide variety are hiding throughout each level waiting to rally each other and shoot you down. What is an ape to do? Three shots and your done for. The enemies before you are well armed with firepower you cannot hope to match. Make for a new hallway and hope for a better situation… or let it take over? The violent urges. The imposing nature of your kind. The jazz. The gameplay loop of Ape Out doesn’t just wear its inspiration on its sleeve, but rather uses it as a jacket. Reminiscent of the break-neck action of Hotline Miami, Ape Out has the player making split second decisions to force their way through troubling and vicious encounters. Enemies will swarm on every side and must be taken down to escape. Unlike Hotline Miami, there is no weapon variety and no special abilities that you can acquire through play. The titular ape has but two actions: push and grab. Pushing an enemy will see them thrown against a wall with such force as to paint it red. The enemies hardly let up either. They will shoot you from afar with rifles, run up close with a shotgun or, among a few other options, attempt to take you on up close and personal with a flamethrower. One option is to force your way through by pushing them all out of the way. However, this does not always prove to be a fruitful endeavor. If there is not a wall that the enemy comes in contact with after being pushed, they will just continue to fire. While pushing one enemy into another typically kills them both, this is also something that may fail. Large armored guards can take those sort of hits and must be pushed into a wall themselves. This is where grabbing an enemy comes into play. Grabbing an enemy renders them useless. That is, useless to their buddies. It's this action that really allows Ape Out's gameplay to open up. Unlike pushing an enemy, you can instead aim where you throw them. You can use them as a body shield capable of taking one hit. Best of all, their trigger finger is always ready. After grabbing an enemy, there will be a slight delay before they take one final shot. This allows you, an ape, to wreak havoc with helpless bodies wielding hunting rifles, shotguns, assault rifles and even flamethrowers. Once the enemy has served its purpose, you can then hurl them at one another and begin the process again. When an enemy is killed, their limbs are tossed to the ground. These limbs can be picked up and thrown at enemies to act as distractions. This allows for important opportunities of escape or creates an opening to rush the enemy. The guns, the limbs, the bodies and the unique cover all make for a simple loop that is endlessly rewarding. Each level in Ape Out starts with a unique theme. This theme layers on unique cover options, environmental hazards for both you and your foes as well as different enemy matchups. One level has SWAT agents crashing in through the windows of a thirty story office building. While you must be careful of getting too close to these windows in fear of getting sniped from afar, they make for an easy kill by allowing you to throw enemies through them. Another level takes place on a cargo ship. You can hide inside of the cargo containers and swing the doors wide to smash enemies behind them. The game's four chapters are each split into eight levels. Each chapter has a distinct visual theme and loose narrative throughline to keep the pace moving. Each level within those chapters melds together seamlessly while still providing clear breakpoints. The pacing and scope of Ape Out is cleverly tied back into the theme, just like every other aspect of this game. Ape Out presents itself as an interactive improvisational jazz percussion album. Four of them actually. Each of the four chapters are presented as an old and tattered record. Four levels on side A, and another four on side B. This theme permeates throughout the entire experience. Each time you kill an enemy, a drum sample is injected into your track. I say "your" track because that is exactly what it is. It is a percussion track generated by your actions. An engaging one at that. Each chapter has an underlining musical theme that ties into that of its visuals. It's often a subtle one, but it is there. It is your actions that help the music unfold. As you take cover behind a wall while an unsuspecting enemy approaches, so too does the hushed drumroll; as you enter into a cargo crate ready to burst through, a muffled high hat number might begin to swell; as enemies swarm you or begin to run away from your fits of rage, the snare and base will take center stage and await the accompaniment of symbols any time you kill an enemy. Every one of your movements and actions add another percussion sample into the mix. Each run of a level is a jazz performance unique to you. What is astounding is that all of this happens naturally and is introduced with such ease. At the beginning of each level a title card appears to hint at what the level has to offer both mechanically and in its audio. They splash the screen with animations that drip with style. Each frame of these animations are accompanied by one of the drum samples that will be used throughout the level. This level of thematic cohesion is seen throughout the experience of Ape Out. Through the main campaign, you are tasked with going through randomly generated levels with little at stake. Each level may take up to five minutes to complete. With such a short runtime and playing again being just a reset away, there is seldom high stakes at play. In addition to this, the main campaign can feel disjointed at times due to unbalanced procedural generation. This can cause multiple runs of the same level to drastically swing to opposite ends of the difficulty spectrum. In one case I found it difficult progress through the first four levels of a chapter, but come end of the second half of the chapter, I had only encountered a small handful of enemies. It wasn’t until playing the same set of levels again that they felt particularly engaging or rewarding. The campaign would have benefited from a tighter restraint on the ways the levels are generated. This was a missed opportunity to offer a better tailored experience to the players and even offer interesting experimentation with the relationship between the gameplay and music. However, given the nature of such random generation, this may not be the case for some players while being exacerbated for others. The second game mode is where the level generation shines though. Arcade mode is where Ape Out will live on. It sees you going through an entire chapter without a breakpoint and with just one life. You rack up points by killing an increasing number of enemies as well as completing the level within a set amount of time. Completing the level with time to spare grants a large point bonus. This is a positive balance to the possibility of having many empty hallways throughout your run. One life. One score. Over and over again. A new viscerally engaging jazz album every time. For those still playing Ape Out in the years to come, it is surely here that they will be drawn. To sum up such an experience in a way that helps you just "get it" is not easy. It is really something that needs to be experienced first hand. Like Hotline Miami, every aspect of Ape Out's identity is crafted in such a way as to pull you in, to keep you hooked, and to demand your return. All of its expertly crafted components come together to make Ape Out on of the best arcade games in years.