Every now and then some clever chap decides he’s going to do an update or remake of a classic formula – blinded by nostalgia, these folks often think these ideas are gold, and will hold up against today’s big guns. It’s because of this school of thought that we now have Monster Madness: The Battle For Suburbia. It’s one part Gauntlet, a cup of Zombies Ate My Neighbours with a pinch of Diablo cooked up on the Unreal 3.0 engine, and while that’s a recipe that could work, Monster Madness’ developers made the fatal mistake of forgetting to check that the game is actually fun to play.
Was that before or after she died?
One gets the feeling quite early in the piece that Monster Madness is an unmitigated disaster. The story is composed almost exclusively from well-worn clichés and stereotypes. You’ve got a main cast consisting of the nerd, the goth chick, the cheerleader and the surfer dude, a couple of monster hunting hicks and a buttload of zombies. Basically it means that you pick one of these four miscreants and travel through five different parts of a nameless city’s suburbs, killing monsters ad infinitum and eventually stopping the force that causes the dead to walk the earth.
Many of the design decisions in Monster Madness are absolutely baffling. In a top-down maze crawler with lots of enemies and melee based combat, why would you make it so the player has to aim their attack? Why would you put the melee attack button on the trigger? Why does the player have to control the camera? Why are the weapons so utterly pathetic against the most basic foes? We’ll never know the answers to these questions, but those are just some of the things that make Monster Madness a chore to play. The controls are really overcomplicated for a game of this type, but more importantly, they feel clunky and lack weight. When you slice a zombie with a katana, you want a little feedback, and Monster Madness just doesn’t give it to you.
Taking zombie love to a new level
The adventure mode is a pretty straightforward romp through a bunch of totally linear levels. Along the way, players have to collect monster tokens to trade in at Larry’s Tool Trailer, which has a tendency to appear in the least convenient location in a level. The trailer will allow players to upgrade their weapons in the hopes that they might actually deal some decent damage to the game’s bestiary, but it’s all really in vain. One would think that multiplayer might have salvaged something from this experience, but the main story mode is only playable locally, on the same machine – quite silly, really.
The competitive multiplayer modes, on the other hand, can actually be played online, but there’s not a whole lot of point – not only is there a distinct lack of opponents, but the experience is limited and somewhat laggy. The selection of game modes is quite limited, offering only basic game types such as capture the flag, king of the hill and The Dojo, which is basically a competition to kill the most AI controlled enemies. The distinct problem is that it isn’t very fun – hence the lack of opponents.
Monster Madness’ single player adventure is reasonably sizeable, but most players are going to want to turn it off after a few minutes due to the sheer tedium of the whole experience. Not even achievements can salvage this one – they’re mostly locked up by having to play the levels on the game’s hardest difficulty, or finding people to play ranked online matches with. It’s just not happening.
When street parties get out of hand
One thing that might surprise many readers is that Monster Madness uses the Unreal 3.0 engine as a base. Now, with the artistic style chosen by the developer, you can’t exactly expect the game to look like Gears of War, but there are certain expectations that one might have when producing a game on a powerful system like the Xbox 360. If you’re going for simplistic visuals, the game should run at a pace that matches, but Monster Madness is sluggish. It only runs at 30 frames per second despite its simplicity, and struggles to maintain it throughout the experience. Not only that, the models are ugly, the animation sucks and the environments, though colourful, just aren’t really that inspiring. To make matters worse, the game’s voice work, dialog and soundtrack are outright cringe-worthy.
Monster Madness: The Battle for Suburbia had the basic idea right – a maze-crawling zombie smash fest – but everything from there has been either poorly conceived or horribly executed. Horrible control mechanics make the experience feel extremely hollow. The game also has a wide range of technical issues that make one struggle to believe that it runs on the Unreal 3.0 engine, which powers big name titles such as BioShock and Gears of War. The overriding experience of the game is that it’s just not fun – games like Gauntlet and Zombies Ate My Neighbours might have been fine 10 years ago, but we’ve moved on – and now expect a bit more depth for our $119.95. One could have easily capitalised on the basic monster smashing theme and taken it further – simplify the control, give the combat weight, ditch the cliché characters and the throwaway plot, chuck in a few horror movie homages and turn the gore up to 11 – that’d be a game worth playing. Monster Madness is best left on the shelf - to rot like the many zombies featured in the game.
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