Feel the thrill of swinging through your veins! Experience the true extent of your skill being tested and the suspense of brand new never before seen levels and challenges in Monkey Ropes. The latest release from PlaySide has been met with great success as was expected because it is the sequel to the sensational Icy Ropes. Monkey Ropes is available to download and play for free on iOS devices from the Apple iTunes App Store as well as on Android devices from the Google Play Store. The game offers an interactive gameplay and retro style graphics in a very handy package size of only 115 MB. Even though the game does not offer a 3D perspective and goes with the 2D perspective outlook approach, you will notice that this only adds to the appeal of the game and you will find yourself glued to the screen of your smartphone for hours on end.
The concept of the game is similar to icy ropes with the addition of many new cool features. Monkey Ropes now offers the option of customizability for your monkey character in the game as well as for the environment. So now you can get all the high scores you want while experiencing pure eye catching and extremely attractive levels. The game now also has a vastly extended collection of new levels for you to choose from. Add to that some new awesome stages and you have got yourself a truly worthwhile upgrade to an absolutely phenomenal game. As expected the game is rated for players of all ages.
Monkey Ropes is a game which rewards you reasonably well for the amount of effort that you put into it. The learning curve is also very well adjusted for players of all skills. If you have played the first game in the series, you will feel quite comfortable while playing this edition as there is no huge change to the general gameplay mechanics. However, even if you are a new player who has never had any experience of playing a swinging game before, the in game tutorial and friendly user interface will most certainly put you at ease. The real difficulty starts when you have crossed many pits and survived for a long time on any level as you unlock higher stages. At these points you will find yourself overpowered by the stage difficulty and you will have no other option than to either upgrade your character to match this difficulty level or to purchase another stage and start your progress over there. This is of course what you would do when playing without any help but after reading the tips mentioned in this guide you should have a wide variety of options to look towards whenever you feel stuck or overwhelmed by the stage or your luck.
1. Master The Controls Of The Swinging
Like all other endless swinging games, the most important skill to master in Monkey Ropes is your control over the movement of the two monkeys. Unlike other 3D games however, this skill is mastered in a different way because you will be viewing your characters in a 2D perspective which makes the controls unique. In Monkey Ropes, there are two monkeys of varying appearances which you can control. The directions you can have the monkeys move in are forward, backward, tilt up and tilt down. The first two directions are quite basic and need no tutorial for even a new player to master. However, the titling of your monkey rope is composed of a combination of the forwards and backwards directions which makes the movement of your characters much more unpredictable and these are the controls that you should make a top priority to master as soon as possible if you want to progress beyond a certain level in Monkey Ropes.
There are no independent controls for titling your characters up or down. The movements are achieved through pressing the left side of the screen of your smartphone or the right side by a certain amount according to the degree of movement required while your monkeys are in the air. For example if you want to just ensure a smooth landing after your monkeys have flown off a steep cliff, you will press the left side and right side by equal amounts so that your monkey rope remains in the horizontal position. It is even more ideal to press the left side a bit more than the right side so that your character is lightly titled down when it touches the ground. This nose landing position gives you a smoother transition as well as reduces chances of the rope breaking when you impact the ground after being in the air for a long time.
Similarly if you want to achieve a more extreme range of motions like a horizontal long jump, front swinging jump or even other multiple aerobatic motions, you will need to keep the left side of the screen pressed for achieving a front swinging jump and the right side of the screen pressed for a horizontal long jump. Monkey Ropes employs some weird physics so you will immediately notice that performing a front swinging jump in quick succession after getting into the air is much harder than doing a horizontal long jump for the same air time due to the additional drag resistance on the monkeys in the former motion. This feature can be annoying at some times when you are desperately trying to get as many coins as possible by performing multiple jumps in quick succession but this is what mastering the controls of your monkey’s swinging will teach you. Once you become a true master, you will always know which moves to execute when you achieve a small air time and which ones to go for when you get “big air” in order to always maximize your high score during a run.
In addition to the regular motions and special acrobatics another important step to mastering the controls of your swinging in Monkey Ropes is knowing when to jump and when to hold back during a specific stage. Each stage has its own difficulty curve which increases as you unlock and purchase higher stages. There is however a set pattern to this increase in difficulty for each stage and with enough practice on a certain level you can become very familiar with this pattern. For example in the classic first stage with the green ground and cliffs, you will get the initial jumps of nearly similar length followed by a much longer and harder jump. Now this pattern repeats over the duration of the stage with increasing narrowness of the hills which makes a swinging landing that much harder. However if you develop a knack for jumping at the right time, you will always be able to clear these obstacles without batting an eye. Needless to say, your mastery over the jumping of your monkeys will always prove to be even more beneficial than your being comfortable with and knowing when to start swinging.
2. Getting The Highest Score
Monkey Ropes is all about being top on the leaderboard and that can only happen when you have a keen sense of the things needed to get a great high score. It might seem that progressing as far as you can on a certain level is the best way to get a good score but there are actually ways unknown to new players which will help you achieve a lot higher score at the expense of a comparatively low amount of effort put into the game. These techniques can be divided into three categories each of which is subsequently discussed below. You can choose to follow any one of these or even combine all three to achieve the maximum boost to your high score in the game.
Calculated Monkey Flights
The easiest way to give a nice boost to your current high score on any level is to start performing approximate calculations while your monkeys are flying off from the edge of a peak or a cliff on the level. The number of calculations that you are able to perform while catching “air” is not restricted and it all matters on your skill and mastery over your reflexes. There are three main kinds of aerobatic motions and you can perform Combos by chaining together multiple jumps in quick succession in order to achieve a high score multiplier which will further boost your score on the level.
The first kind of monkey jump in the game is the simple horizontal motion. There are multiple kinds of ways to achieve this motion in the game. You can perform the front horizontal jump, the back jump, and front swinging horizontal jump. The basic front and back jumps are performed by using ratios of pressing of the left side of the screen to the right side. However, the other jumps can only be performed when you are suspended in the air and press the left or right side of the screen in the process. Needless to say these jumps are limited in number by how long your character is in the air for and it has three times the score value of normal horizontal jumps. Always try to avoid these jumps because you can most certainly get a lot of extra value through multiple normal jumps rather than breaking your character’s natural flow for a small instant boost. The best way to avoid loss is to predict your landing timing and slightly tilting your character towards the ground just before you touch the ground. This will ensure that you have a near perfect landing and avoid any rolling or instability of your character.
The most common form of in air motion experienced in Monkey Ropes is the “air” time. This motion is quite natural and occurs whenever your monkeys fly off the edge of a cliff or hill peak for a longer than normal jump. It is a very desirable type of motion because the longer you stay in the air, the greater your multiplier will be when you perform aerobatic motions during that air time. The key to getting as much air time as possible is to always keep the left side of the screen pressed and your monkeys even when you see monsters or obstacles looming ahead. Not only will this add to the excitement and rush of adrenaline that you are bound to experience, it will almost certainly lead towards the coveted “big air” time. This is the maximum air time you can get and you can chain together multiple motions during this huge jump. The “big air” should be aimed for in most situations but you should be careful only when you have many obstacles in front of you. Whenever you have a feeling you will not be able to make a certain jump just lightly tap the left side of the screen to initiate a small jump that will propel you to the edge of the cliff so that you can better judge the distance of the jump and make it more confidently the next time that you attempt it.
Repeating Levels and Practicing
Monkey Ropes is an endless swinger game so there is no restriction on how many times you can repeat a level and you can abuse this feature to always get ahead of the difficulty curve in the game. The main problem which most players face is the lack of coins available to upgrade their characters in order to tackle a hard level that they just unlocked and purchased or for the purchase of a better looking background. By repeating certain levels which guarantee an easy accumulation of coins you can avoid being stuck in a loop for all the time that you will be playing the game.
Repeating levels also has the added benefit of making you familiar with almost all the obstacles and dangers that you are likely to face during that particular level. The game has been designed in a way to trick you into believing that there are different monsters and obstacles each time you restart the game. However, in reality all the obstacles on a certain level are still the same only arranged in a different manner as to the last time that you played it. Therefore with enough practice you can easily predict which obstacle is next in line on a particular level and make arrangements to deal with them beforehand.
Collecting The Gold Coins
This is an objective which should be on your low priority list. If the two options mentioned above do not work well with you then you should try out collecting as many coins as you can as you progress through any stage. The coins start at low denominations and increase as you move further in the stage to a maximum of 5000 value coins. Now the problem with making this a primary source of your high score is the random distribution of coins along the way. Sometimes you might get lucky and get an entire series of 5000 value coins which will definitely propeller you much further than the other two techniques but at other times you might get stuck with only 100 or 500 coins which will surely annoy you to no end.
However if you feel that the adrenaline rush from swinging at high speeds is too much for you and you would rather like to play a safe game, collecting high value coins is a very good option for you. Just play a calm and relaxed game without worrying about any landing or air time acrobatics but never expect yourself to get very far ahead of other players who rely on the other two techniques as their source for high scores.
3. Staying Safe And Escaping Monsters
One of the greatest challenges in Monkey ropes is the inclusion of many different kinds of monsters and obstacles by the developers in order to make the game much tougher for players. These hurdles can be quite daunting for a new player but are very easy to deal with once you learn and remember the main points about each of them. This guide summarizes all the main kinds of obstacles and monsters that you are likely to face in Monkey Ropes and tips on how best to deal with them.
Deep Ditches
The most common and obvious type of obstacle in Monkey Ropes are the deep and menacing looking gaps between the firm and safe ground. These are in fact the major reason of the swinging mechanism existing in the game and will probably be the most frequent cause of your death in Monkey Ropes. A very easy way to deal with these deep ditches of death is to estimate the required jumping distance beforehand. This can be achieved by approaching the very edge of the cliff just before your monkey is about to fall down. To do this, you must tap lightly on the left side of the screen of your smartphone until both the monkeys have reached the edge of the cliff.
At this point, you can tap for a long time on the right side of the screen of your smartphone to initiate a calibration jump and immediately release it as soon as you see the first monkey approaching the end of the next cliff after the ditch. Releasing your finger from the screen at this point will cause a perfect swing to be set in motion and you can even chain together multiple long taps on the screen similar to the process you did for the mentioned jump in order to save time and progress much further in the game than you could earlier.
It is important for you to know that Monkey Ropes tests your reflexes to their limit and has a unique mechanism of recovery. This means that even if one of your monkeys has fallen down into a ditch, you can still save him by quickly swinging over to the next cliff. However if you just watch him going down, the other monkey will also fall down and it will be game over for you. So act fast and Monkey Ropes will reward you handsomely.
Crocodiles And Flaming Turtles
As if dealing with deep ditches and the fear of falling down all the time was not enough of a challenge, the developers have made sure to keep the game as tough as possible by adding crocs in the water ditches and flaming turtles on cliffs. The crocs seem very intimidating but they can only move in a vertical direction and much like classic arcade games, they have a set timing which they follow so you can stand at the edge of a cliff and observe for some time before initiating the swing. You will have to take care however that both of your monkeys are able to cross over to safety in this window or else one of them might be eaten by the croc.
Similarly you will have to deal with the flaming turtles which are able to spit out balls of flaming fire and are red in color. These seemingly innocent looking turtles are usually placed at the very edge of a cliff and this makes it very difficult to avoid them. These are in fact much harder to deal with as compared to the crocs as the technique of approaching the edge of a cliff before swinging does not work when there is a flaming turtle sitting waiting for you on the other edge of the cliff. The best way to deal with these monsters is to wait before they spit out their flaming ball of fire and use the few second window provided in between consecutive spits to swing over to the other side. The turtles cannot turn to the other side so if you manage to successfully swing to the edge that faces behind them, you will be safe from their danger.
Monkey Ropes is a truly challenging title that will frustrate you many times but follow this guide and maintain a level of patience to become a legendary swinger in the game!