[REVIEW] Monday Night Combat
Part Tower Defense, part Team Fortress, all awesome.
Pick from one of six character classes: The Tank and the Gunner who are good for straightforward run-and-gun action, the Support who can heal your team & defense weapons as well as spawn turrets, the Assault who is the most well-rounded class (perfect for n00bz), Snipers (pretty self-explainetory), and the deadly Assassin who’s not only so sexy that they put word “ass” in her name twice, but she has some sick Predator-ish camouflage and has a big-ass knife which can be upgraded into a bigger-ass sword.
The object of the game is simple: take out the other team’s Moneyball while defending your own by spawning robots and setting up weapon systems around your base in head-to-head online play that supports up to 8 players. Simple, but addicting. VERY addicting.
If the competitive mode doesn’t tickle your fancy (which it should because that’s the best part of the game!), you can do single-player mode where you defend your Moneyball against increasing swarms of enemy bots - and if you get lonely, you can take on the bots in 2-player splitscreen mode.
Variety is the spice of life. For reals. There’s so much variety in this game. Everything from the cast of characters to how you manage your skill upgrades. You even have options on how to play: do you save money earned from kills for beefing up your defense arsenal and spawning bots to distract the enemy team, or do you spend it all on upgrades? You even have the ability to spend money on customizing one of the characters, enhancing specific attributes. You could spend hours with each character in the game and still not find new ways to approach certain situations.
Presentation is everything. If there’s one thing this game has for sure, it’s production value. The graphics are polished, the characters are full of life, and the announcer has wit and charm. Uber Entertainment also did an awesome job at pulling off their vision of an alternate future where Monday Night Combat is a real sport; the small details like logo designs for fictitious sponsors and commercial plugs from the announcer.
The levels. While there’s only a handful of levels, you really get the sense that the dudes at Uber took the time to tailor-make certain aspects of each map work for each of the character classes. For example, if you’re playing as an Assassin, you might find yourself sticking along certain paths that you wouldn’t normally take as, say, a Sniper.
Final word.
Seriously, there wasn’t anything that I didn’t like about Monday Night Combat. At first I didn’t think this sort of game was for me because I never really got into Team Fortress (or class-based shooters, for that matter), but once I figured out how to use each character (I’m a pretty bad-ass Assassin btw), I became pretty addicted. This is the sort of game that you think you’ve only been playing for 30 minutes when, in reality, 3 1/2 hours have gone by.
Monday Night Combat was developed by Uber Entertainment and published by Microsoft Games Studios. A review code was given to us by the developer. If you get wrecked by an Assassin named brownkidd, that was totally me.
