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Monster Madness - Review
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RRP: £Various
Out 22 June
Buy PC for £14.98 >>
Buy X360 for £38.48 >>
A console replete with first-person and tactical shooters, the 360 will welcome any cartoonish, fun, co-op action fighter. Monster Madness promises madcap monster-bashing fun – but does it deliver?
There’s just about every type of monster you can think of to battle with: 50 different types of zombies, werewolves, vampires and gremlins, and every other variety of ghoul. You have a choice of four characters to play: there’s your geek boy Zack, Andy the surfer dude, Carrie the goth and Jennifer the cheerleader. Up to four players can play together as the four characters in the story “Campaign”, or against each other online in a variety of multiplayer options such as “Capture the Flag”, “King of the Hill” and straightforward “Deathmatch” – both single and team.
The campaign makes up the meat of the game, and with varied and attractive environments like suburban towns and parks, and tons of collectables and weapons upgrades, this should be super fun. It isn’t, for one reason and one reason alone: the controls are abysmal. By this we don’t mean that they are unresponsive or particularly complex. They’re just all in the wrong places. The moves you use most often are assigned to the wrong buttons, like jumping being assigned to clicking the right stick, while more accessible buttons like A and X are assigned to weapons changing which is hardly ever needed.
The game is also extremely hard, with boss fights and hordes of enemies overwhelming you more often than not and setting you back to far off check points with none of the money or items you’ve collected since then. Playing the story in co-op with friends is much easier but the camera becomes useless, moving all over the place and making it hard to see where you’re going.
It’s not monstrously bad but it is madness to shackle a potentially great game with such sloppy controls.
5/10
Review by Kirsten Kearney
