Monkey King: Hero is Back - Review

Ever since growing up with Monkey (the Japanese adaptation of Journey to the West), there has been countless retellings of the story of Journey to the West and the Monkey King. 2015 saw Monkey King: Hero is Back as the highest grossing CGI movie in China. Now all the way over in 2019, in a somewhat baffling move we get the movie tie-in game. THQ Nordic has helped bring the game over to western audiences. The premise of the movie and game caught my attention enough to want to check it out.

Sun Wukong (just called Dasheng in this game) is the Monkey King, born from stone, incredibly powerful and to the Gods very dangerous. After amassing more and more power until he was more powerful than the Gods, Buddha put a stop to it and imprisoned the Monkey King in crystal. Don’t worry, the intro cutscene does a better job of explaining it. After 500 year Dasheng is accidentally awoken by Luier and An-An, a young boy and his baby sister he carries with him. After helping to protect them from monsters that were chasing after Luier, Dasheng finds his powers have been shackled by a chain he can’t remove. The only way he can hope to remove it, Dasheng must do good things. He reluctantly joins Luier and An An on their journey. The Monkey King finds out that monsters are running rampant and someone is kidnapping babies, a lot of babies. Dasheng needs to learn to stop being a jerk and regain his powers.

The story is told between cutscenes, in-game cut scenes, and strange motion comic looking scenes that feel like they’re there to save on animating more scenes. Having not seen the movie I can only guess the game follows the movie’s plot, some scenes feel like they could’ve been pulled directly from it. The motion comic cutscenes were a strange choice. They portray scenes that really would have benefited from being a proper cutscene, and it’s unclear if it was not having the time or budget or resources to make them. Finally there’s walk and talk transitional scenes. You control Dasheng to walk at a snail's pace as the characters talk their way. The only saving grace is that they don’t happen often, unlike the motion comic cutscenes.

Monkey King is a third person brawler. It plays like a kids version of God of War or The Batman Arkham series, only without a lot of nuance to combat. Like most combat driven games there is a normal attack and a heavy attack, and you can roll out of the way to dodge. Dasheng can also pick up benches, rocks and staffs left laying around to do extra damage, or to hit monsters that you can’t hit normally. If you sneak up on enemies or knock them over you can also get in button prompts to potentially get in an easier win.

As you progress through the game you get increasing access to Dasheng’s magical skills. Whenever you defeat enemies you gain points you can spend on purchasing and upgrading, I upgraded the skills as I went, but I never actually needed them, which made the whole system to feel redundant.

Dasheng moves so slowly. While his punches feel like there’s weight behind them and timing is important, the movement is too slow. When you’re not in combat the movement and jumping is slow, and the jumping never feels good. Everything feels slightly beyond the height you jump so it’s always hard to judge if you can jump there. The game could be 1-2 hours shorter if Dasheng could really run and jump around more freely.

While the Monkey King poses very little difficulty throughout, I am also not likely the target audience for this game. Which makes it a weird decision to be so tough with health recovery. Your health isn’t restored at checkpoints, even defeating the bosses doesn’t give enough health to refill your bar. You must craft healing items to restore the health meter, but for some time the amount of health recovered from them is pretty low.

If you want to craft healing items or items to help with offence and defence, you need to have the resources to craft them. This is done by finding plants, bugs and minerals in the world. It never really comes in handy until the last hour of the game, where there is an excess of boss fights that can do major damage. Across the eight hours with Monkey King I only died once. Even with a bunch of revive items I only used one. For kids it may be a different matter.

Watching footage from the movie it looks like they’ve captured the look of it really well. It helps that the CGI characters have stylised looks that translates well into games. The environments look beautiful as a backdrop to the more slower paced game that’s within it. They might not be exciting locations, but they are full of vibrant colour and make the world look much bigger than it really is. While it’s hardly a super special visual effect, it was also nice that Dasheng’s hair moved around as he moved. It feels like the developers focused into making him move and look good.

English voice acting is a mix between the okay and the awful. While Dasheng isn’t a Monkey King of many words, for most of the story he sounds alright. Luier is up there for some of the worst voice acting I’ve heard in some time, mostly because it’s so jarring. Thankfully there is an option to change the voice tracks. The music suits the environments and the style of the game. It feels like the visuals and music could’ve been pulled from the movie at times.

Overall Monkey King runs decently. The game looks nice enough and the visuals are cartoony and exaggerated for younger audiences. It feels like playing a CGI movie (we finally got to feel like playing Toy Story on a Playstation!). While it runs well enough, the frame rate can be all over the place for no real reason. It’s never enough to spoil gameplay, just noticeable. The strangest issue with the game is the amount of loading that happens. Want to climb or jump down a ladder? There’s a brief cutscene of it to mask loading. Many areas are divided into sections that require load screens, even a small room with only a chest to open. For a game in 2019, or even in 2015, the amount of loading screens is excessive. It makes the entire game feel extremely segmented, like it was a 3DS Monster Hunter game. I also found that there is a Season Pass for Monkey King. I did not expect this as there is not enough to the game to really make extra skins worth it. This pass boasts extra game modes and chapters, a bit cheeky given the game is already a tad light on content as it is. Worse is the pass isn’t far off from the full price of the main game! What comes across as a cheaper game is really much closer to a full price AAA game.

Monkey King: Hero is Back is an oddity in a number of ways, most notably being a movie tie-in game to a movie from 2015. There is a perfectly serviceable 3rd person brawler here, but these kinds of movie games seem almost like a relic of the previous gen consoles. While adults will likely struggle to enjoy this breezy game, it would definitely be something kids could enjoy for a few days. If you’re looking for another interpretation on Journey to the West, there are much better titles out there. If you want an interesting take on the Monkey King character it’s probably worth checking out the movie instead.