Monkeys Ahoy is yet another of literally hundreds of mobile app Match-3/Bejewelled/Candy Crush ripoff games infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. Weirdly this isn't a mobile port, because I couldn't see it on any app stores, but it 100% looks and feels like a mobile app. And, laughably, they want money for this. You can play Candy Crush for free, so this is a weird business model that apparently, predictably, and deservedly failed.
The only differentiators in this mobile app in exile is that you can match either object types or object colours, and you can chain your matches together to get much larger scores... that's really all there is to it. Fairly pointless.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all)?.
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Monkeys Ahoy might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Monkeys Ahoy has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam, many of which are free match-3 games. So even if you did want to play a match-3 game on Steam, well, don't pay money for this one.
For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Borderlands 2", "Assetto Corsa" or "Middle Earth - Shadow of War". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
