The story of being stranded on a tropical island is as old as man's first attempts to navigate the vast seas.  In each retelling, the stranded crew is forced to survive the trials of their new home.  In Monkey Madness: Island Escape, that trial is a pack of deranged apes striving to snuff you out.  Unfortunately for Monkey Madness, the game itself is about a tedious as being trapped on a tropical island.

Monkey Madness is an on-rails shooter.  You move through 10 environments, stopping to put an end to the guerilla attacks.  Your default squirt-gun is apparently capable to downing chimps with a few shots, and stopping a flung banana mid-flight.  However, downed foes drop coins that give you temporary weapons, like a coconut gun (it does not fire in spurts) capable of plastering even the most persistent enemies and a peanut gun (somebody owes Rare a thank you card) that has a high rate of fire.   As you progress through locales such as beaches, jungles, ancient ruins (monkey ruins?), and pirate caves (monkey pirates?), you encounter new forms of primate to push to extinction.  Conventional banana-flinging simians give way to mummified monkeys throwing what I hope are rocks, give way to ninja monkeys throwing shurikens.  Soldier, pirate, and shaman monkeys all strive to end your fragile life.

You aim at your ape antagonists by dragging the stylus across the touch screen and fire at the furry fiends by pressing a button – any button.  The game treats the bottom screen more like a trackpad than a touch screen.  The on-screen cursor moves based on relative position, so regardless of where the stylus is on the touch screen and where your reticle is on the top screen, moving the stylus down causes the cursor to move down with it.  Sometimes this feels nice; you don't feel like you need to map your position on the bottom screen to the top screen's location.  However, when there are many enemies positioned across the screen, a tap-to-shoot mode seems like it would have worked considerably better.  The issue of mapping your aim to the touch screen could have been resolved by simply moving the action to the bottom screen.  An extra bit of frustration is that each shot causes kickback, so your aim drifts slightly up, and you must adjust for it.

The primary problem with Monkey Madness: Island Escape is that it's dull and short.  There's nothing about the title to really get the player's attention.  While it's true that the scenery changes and the different enemies provide some variation (for example, ninjas speed from spot to spot to launch their attacks), the game feels incredibly repetitive.  Nothing besides your enemies, some of which don't even seem interested in your presence, can be shot.  There are no hidden power-ups, secondary paths, or additional opportunities to score points.  Other titles have featured similar gameplay styles as mini-games and have offered more depth.

At no point should your strategy not be "shoot the enemy's attacks down and then gun as hard as you can at your foes."  If the game were exciting, that might be forgivable, however, there are usually no more than three foes on screen. So while you can die, you never feel like you're really pinned down by primates.

Perhaps mercifully, the game's 10 levels are very short.  Monkey Madness could be beaten within a single hour, and there is little reason to replay it.  There is a multiplayer mode, but it requires two copies of the game and doesn't seem to add much to the experience beyond a second shooter.

The game's presentation is as dull as the gameplay.  While not technically flawed, the graphics don't make use of the power of the DS.  It is colorful, and the models are nicely animated, but the textures are lacking, including the textures on objects that you are right next to, making an otherwise decent-looking game look muddy.  Strangely, the hand-drawn content actually looks a bit worse.

The interface has an odd hitch too.  Your health is represented by a bunch of bananas, hanging from a tree.  As you take damage, a monkey punches the tree, knocking some of them off.  If you're taking a lot of damage the game will still animate the entire sequence of him knocking off the bananas before continuing on.  There was a place where I was killed repeatedly, because of the sheer number of projectiles buffeting me.  The top screen froze, but the audio continued to play.  After a second I got the game over screen.  I believed, wrongly, that I had encountered a frozen game.  What was actually happening was that it was animating all of my life falling away before giving me a game over.

The sound is a bit better than the visuals.  The upbeat music fits the game's bright and cheerful demeanor, subject matter not withstanding.  There are only a small number of sound effects, so expect to hear the same shooting sounds over and over.

I can't recommend Monkey Madness: Island Escape.  It's too short and repetitive to provide any discernible replay value.  The excitement never rises above me trying to determine how many monkey puns I could squeeze into this review (disappointingly, just one).  If the game featured more content, interactive environments, or some kind of variation in gameplay, it could have been a decent title.  However, it doesn't so it isn't.