Monkey Ball is cute and all, but this game gave me what I always wanted out of the franchise: a full world to explore with the tilting-rolling mechanics. Having NPCs to chat to and quests to undertake appeals to the 3D platform adventure nut in me, in a different way to the core puzzle-action levels that Monkey Ball is about in most of the games outside this one. I like those bits too, and the quick resets help the trial-and-error gameplay stay compelling.

Unfortunately I slipped off the difficulty curve. I cleared out the first world with some difficulty, after adjusting to the slow-paced but rewarding traversal compared to the unforgiving and hectic puzzle stages. The theme park world was trickier, and I just made no progress in the clockwork world and had to put the game away. Retrying the same challenges again and again gets tedious, and the combination of momentum and precision was too much for me to master.

It doesn’t help that I was playing the PSP version, with its technical limitations, load/save times, and inferior joystick. An octagonal gate like the Gamecube controller’s is ideal for this game and I felt a little handicapped without it. Nevertheless, I did enjoy what the game was presenting to me while I lasted on it. This game gets a bad rap that is, I feel, unwarranted. At the least it shows to me that Traveller’s Tales have always been capable of more than just Lego games, although they’re decent at that too.