(P)hail to the Chimp

Hail to the Chimp (PlayStation 3: June, 2008)

What seems like forever ago now, I downloaded a demo of Hail to the Chimp. It seemed like a light-hearted and entertaining party game, enjoyable for me and a group of up to 3 of my closest friends/worst enemies to laugh our bums off for hours on end. Holy crap, did I just say bum? Sorry, I guess the British in that Kiki must’ve worn off on me....

Anyway, I’ve never been more wrong about a video game’s entertainment value. You see, the demo’s got maybe 20 minutes in it; the typical for a free demonstration of a larger product. Naturally, I assumed that since the demo was entertaining for the full 20 minutes, the full version would be just as entertaining, maybe not for the full length of time you’d put into it to see everything, but at least for most of it. Oh, how wrong I was... You ever go to a movie after seeing a trailer that makes you go, “Wow, that looks like a good movie,” and then leave when you realize you’d already seen all the best parts of it before you went in? That’s exactly what happened with Hail to the Chimp. 20 minutes is about all the time you need to spend on this game before you realize the rest of it will be exactly the same. All the mini-games are just slight modifications of the same damn thing. You compete with three other characters to collect clams, which, in the animal world are somehow the equivalent of electoral votes, and either throw in a ballot box, feed them to another clam, or beat more of them out of your opponents until you’ve got more than they do. “Variety” is apparently not a word in developer Gamecock’s vocabulary.

Looking around for the web for this game, you’ll find other reviewers agree with me whole-heartedly, but some actually hold this sorry excuse for entertainment in moderately high regard. That’s because there are some redeeming qualities in the game. Well... there’s one, anyway: humor. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the game is a satirical work of genius, but it’s at least a satirical work of higher than average intelligence. There are plenty of things to laugh at in this game. The problem, though, is that almost none of them have anything to do with actual gameplay. All the laughs come in the extra features and the cinematics, which can only be unlocked by playing through the monotonous single-player Campaign mode 20 times. In order to actually enjoy yourself and watch about 30 seconds of comedy, you’ve first got to subject yourself to 3 hours of torture (It’s a lot like watching “Comedy Central Presents...” in that way). Not only that, there’s no list available anywhere, in the game or even on the internet, to tell you what you have to accomplish in order to unlock specific extras. Basically, the whole “game” is about as entertaining as jamming your fingers into a paper shredder. It’s a lot of pain to go through for a tiny amount of comedy that’s actually pretty hard to find.

Overall score: 3 out of 10, for sucking less than some of the other games I've played.