Indie startup Disco Pixel have announced that their monkey-themed rhythm game, Jungle Rumble, previously available as an app for mobile phones, will be making its way to the PS Vita.
The premise of Jungle Rumble is similar to the opening twenty or so minutes of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. You are in charge of a tribe of monkeys who are getting along just fine, until territorial disputes with a rival clan sparks all-out warfare. Plenty of bloodletting ensues, with bones being crushed, monolith-alien beings showing up, and glorious victory achieved atop piles of corpses.
That last sentence isn’t quite true, as you no doubt suspected. In Jungle Rumble, you control your tribe of monkeys by tapping your fingers on the screen in rhythmic fashion as a steady 4/4 tribal beat thunders in the background. Like Crypt of the Necrodancer, another game with a similar concept, actions are only successfully initiated by drumming your fingers in time with the beat, whether it involves swinging monkeys from tree to tree or hurling deadly coconuts to dispatch enemy simians. The more steady you are with the beat, the more intense the music becomes. Screw it up, and you are left with an awkward silence that can only be cured by picking up the pace.
The PS Vita port will feature several upgrades over its mobile counterpart. These include a new tutorial that better familiarizes players with the gameplay, more levels to wage your rhythmic war, a larger variety of tunes to play along to, and several other currently unannounced features.
More information on Jungle Rumble will certainly make its way through Disco Pixel’s Facebook page.