Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 15 Aug 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Kevin Pocock

Our Rating 1 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Monster Madness is an arcade-style action game with inoffensive cartoon-like visuals.

Your job is to protect surbubia from the zombie and monster hordes by taking on the role of high school characters Zack, Carrie, Andy and Jennifer. Our four heroes can swing, throw and fire a wide variety of weapons, from axes to rocket launchers.

Unfortunately, this doesn't add up to an enjoyable game. The inexplicable invasion of suburbia is confusing, the character design is boring and stereotyped and the physics are less than impressive. The difficulty level also see-saws in an unsatisfying manner, and the graphics do little to impress.

If Monster Madness were simply a good old-fashioned arcade-style game that required the player to hit buttons ever faster, it might still be fun, but the standard keyboard controls are unnecessarily complicated. The constant need to look down at the keys to work out how to move while being bitten to death is far from enjoyable. A joypad makes this less of a problem, but the controls are still confusing at times.

This is probably due to the fact that Monster Madness was developed simultaneously for the Xbox 360. On several occasions the game asks you to press the 'A' button to continue. Unfortunately, it's not referring to the A key, but rather the A button on the Xbox 360 controller. The game actually wants you to hit the Enter button, but the developers have made no effort to change this detail on the in-game menus.

This is a shame because Monster Madness could have been a silly and amusing bit of fun, but the game's lack of polish prevents you actually enjoying it. The original concept may have seemed amusing, but playing the game simply isn't.

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