Every week, we like to highlight some of the titles we’ve enjoyed on Game Pass, as part of our Spotlight series. If you read about it here, you should probably add it to your Game Pass queue!
Ape Out caught my eye at this years Gamescom, following the announcement of it’s arrival on Game Pass.
With a bombastic jazz fuelled soundtrack and highly stylized visuals, ape Out is effectively Hotline Miami, but with the sheer power of apes. The objective? Get the Ape out of his cell, and kill anyone who stands in your way.
Being an ape, you have a limited move set. Shove, allowing you to splatter enemies into walls, windows, and each other. Then there’s grab, allowing you to use unwitting enemies as a shield, before then shoving them into walls, windows and each other. Each hit, kill and moment is punctuated with the soundtrack, with cymbals and drums crashing and thumping in chaotic time with your escape. It’s great.
The game is setup like a mixtape, with each level focusing on a different song and tempo as you make your way from A to B. The way level titles and moments hit alongside the music had me grinning ear to ear.
What I particularly like is the way the top down perspective works. Unlike Hotline Miami, the walls stretch and obscure your view, meaning that you can’t see ahead or into rooms before you get there, meaning that while you can charge in like a rampaging gorilla, you do have to be a little tactical.
Enemies have some variation, from goons wielding shotguns, rifles, flamethrowers, to other goons strapped with explosives that like to throw dynamite. Pro-tip? You can sling it right back to them.
There are checkpoints, and if you die, you do get a wonderful death screen, showing how close (or how far) you were from success, in addition to your meandering path of carnage and destruction.
Without a doubt this simian simulator is most assuredly worth checking out, so give it a go on Gamepass.
