Mini Review – Monday Night Combat

Third-person Shooter

There’s nothing funny about a dickless moron with a battery up his ass.

Danny

Monday Night Combat was a game I was not expecting to like very much as most shooters that appear on XBLA are generally a little naff. MNC breaks this trend thanks to it’s unique gameplay mixture of a typical third-person shooter and a take on Defence of the Ancients (a clever custom scenario for Warcraft III that mixed RTS and Tower Defence gameplay).  There are two modes, one of which is a co-op tower defence style mode where you go around placing turrets and shooting robots. The other is the main gameplay mode where you must lead your forever spawning arm of robots to the enemy’s ‘money ball’ to lower it’s shield which will allow you to destroy it thus winning the game.

TV party tonight!

The game also features six character classes which can be upgraded throughout the mission by earning money which you get for killing the enemy’s ‘PROs’ (players) and robots. You can also use the money you earn to build and upgrade defences, activate traps and spawn unique class based robots.  Tactical play is rewarded and it’s generally the team that cooperates the most that will win.

Of course there are some problems like ending up with a bunch of randoms with no sense of strategy and sometimes people have an annoying habbit of picking the same class, so you end up having four support class players in one team. The game can be a tiny be glitchy at times but nothing too game-breaking from what I have experienced. Even with some of its flaws there is really nothing like MNC on the Xbox 360 and as online shooters go for the system it easily beats most of the competition, even the full retail stuff. The game has plenty of character and the gameplay is frantic and fun. The demo is also very generous so there is absolutely no reason for you to not check this game out.  Easily one of the best shooters for the system at the time of writing.

8/10