Act: Cactus Bruce & the Corporate Monkeys [by Blue Tea Games]

Game Review:  Cactus Bruce
Release: October 13, 2004
Genre: Action
Developer:  Blue Tea Games
System Requirements: 200MHz, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Players: 1
Price: $19.95
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Cactus Bruce and the Corporate Monkeys is, first and foremost, hilarious. You play a one-eyed pirate cactus (!) defending your home, Foster Island, from becoming a banana republic ( Bananas Foster, mmm yummy!...) under the domination of Hollabanger Corporation and its army of Corporate Monkeys (who try to conk you on the head with coconuts).

[Brief History Lesson: A “banana republic” is a small Central or South American country which has been monopolized by an international corporation, so that the whole country is geared toward producing that company's product, often a tropical fruit crop such as bananas. This is why bananas in American grocery stores are really cheap, even though they're imported. You do NOT want this to happen to your island – it would be like living in one of those company towns of the early 1900s, only a little better than being a slave on a plantation.]

So, you must defend your home from this corporate takeover at all costs! Smack those monkeys before they smack you! Fortunately you have a unique weapon – a 1 ton claw machine – and several helpful friends such as an Billy the Elastic Blowfish and Marvin the Explosive Snowman.

Graphics: 8
Cartoony 3-d graphics worked well for this game. The backgrounds are rather artistic, the blowfish is cool, the monkeys were monkeys, the bird was a bit awkward-looking, Cactus Bruce himself is an ugly mug, but I suppose that's appropriate for a pirate. All in all the graphics looked good, although none of them were really amazing. I did object to the fact that the newspaper you get an issue of every few levels looked nothing like a newspaper.

Sound: 8
The music (all-synthesized, reminiscent of Sim City and Dr. Mario) was fun and did not get on my nerves even after listening to it for a long time. The sound effects were very funny, especially Cactus Bruce's quotes and the way the monkeys screech if you shoot them off the edge of the screen. The only sound effect I didn't like was when Cactus Bruce got hit with a coconut – it was disconcerting because his “ouch!” was not in the same low growling voice as his quotes, and didn't sound like it could have been spoken by the same character.

Game Play: 9
Gameplay is a cross between a Frozen Bubble-type game and a Breakout-type game. From the bottom center of the screen you must pivot your claw to block incoming coconuts, grab monkeys and other ammo/bonuses, and shoot all the anchor blocks on the screen until the Corporate Structure collapses. There are 50 levels of increasing difficulty. Each level has a time limit, but I never actually ran out of time, I always passed the level or ran out of lives first. You get 3 lives, which you can only lose by being hit by a coconut. If you lose a life you can regain it by catching a heart bonus, but you can't stockpile lives, 3 is the max you can have. This difficulty is balanced by the fact that if you do lose all 3 lives you can chose to continue with 3 more lives for only a small loss of points.

Furthermore, Cactus Bruce has lots of good options. The game has 4 difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Bananza!, of which Easy would be good for a child, Normal was about right for uncoordinated me, and the other two should challenge even the quickest-fingered gamers. There is a whole-game high score table, a time trial/challenge mode for individual levels, and a level-editor for those who like to 'monkey-around' with making their own levels, and an automatic 'continue from last level beaten' option.

Value: 8
Very funny, pretty replayable, reasonable price... my only disappointment was that I had completed every level in about 3 hours; however, the developer informs me that in the near future a forum for downloading additional levels and exchanging user-designed levels will be added to Blue Tea's website (link below) so you can feed your (monkey) smack habit.

Concept: 10
This unique variation on 'defend the homeland' should appeal to a huge audience, from kids who just like flinging monkeys around to over-educated people like me who are reminded of Pablo Neruda's poem “The United Fruit Company”. (Google it, you know you want to.)

Fun: 10
Any night is, in the words of Cactus Bruce, “A fine night for monkey smackin'!”

Overall: 9
In conclusion, this game had a very funny concept, great gameplay solid graphics and sound, and although it could have used some typo-checking and would have been strengthened by re-thinking a few pieces of content to better match the concept (A Trojan Horse? In modern Central America?), it was pure fun to play.

Added: November 2nd 2004
Reviewer: Sunandshadow
Score:
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Language: english