What Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is a 3D platformer where you roll AiAi and friends inside a ball across narrow courses suspended over open space. The goal in each stage is simple: keep momentum, hold your line through turns, and reach the goal before time runs out. The game pulls together more than 300 stages from Super Monkey Ball, Super Monkey Ball 2 and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, so you get a large stack of levels in one package rather than a single short campaign.
Story Mode follows the monkey team — AiAi, MeeMee, GonGon, Baby, YanYan and Doctor — as they try to stop Dr. Bad-Boon from blowing up Jungle Island and get their bananas back. The story is told in a comic-book style, so cutscenes stay brief and keep you moving between runs. You can also customize your character and your Super Monkey Ball to change how you look on the course.
Playing together
The Steam features list Remote Play Together, which lets friends join your session over the internet as if they were sitting beside you. On top of that, the game includes 12 minigames — Monkey Racing, Monkey Soccer, Monkey Bowling, Monkey Baseball and others — built for competing against each other rather than cooperating. Those minigames are where a group naturally splits up and starts chasing the top spot.
There are online leaderboards for chasing scores, so a group can keep comparing runs after the session ends. Note that the tags mention both Local Multiplayer and Online Co-Op, but the only Steam feature listed is Remote Play Together, so check how your group wants to connect before you start.
Before you start
Expect a difficulty curve. The course design rewards precise steering and reading the terrain ahead, and it is easy to overshoot a corner and fall off the edge. Early stages ease you in, but later ones assume you have the tilt and roll controls down cold. A controller is tagged for this game, which suits the analog steering the levels demand.
The stage count is the main draw: hundreds of levels plus minigames give plenty of replay value once you are chasing faster times or better scores. Pick a character you like the look of, spend a few runs getting used to how the ball handles, then work through Story Mode or jump straight into minigames with friends.