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Four friends get together for a party while the parents are away, but somebody … or something, is about to crash the party. In four-player melee action, you will fight off the monster invasion in this top-down action/shooting game. Customize and build your own weapons by grabbing parts from the house and town to create more powerful attack tools, and find rare parts to build some ultimate weapons. Jack abandoned vehicles and deck them out with weapons to ride through the terrain and take out creatures. Visit five locations, including the suburban town, the high school, and the “Shopping Maul.” The use of the Ageia NovodeX Physics platform allows you to interact with the environments physics to give yourself an advantage, such as creating barrides or throwing large objects, while the visual system uses the advanced Unreal 3 Engine.

Genre: Action

Publisher: SouthPeak Games

Developer/Co-Developer: Artificial Studios / Immersion Games

Online Play: 16 Versus

Local Play: 4 Versus/ 4 Co-op

June 19, 2007 –
Monster Madness has been a blip on our radar since before we knew what “next-gen” games would actually look like. On the surface it sounded like an attractive package: top down action with upgradeable weapons, four-player co-op, online multiplayer, and an exaggerated Halloween theme. All the right components are there, but this is an instance where the final product turned out to be worth a lot less than the sum of its parts.

The most important bit of information to know before purchasing Monster Madness is the difference between the Adventure portion of the game and the Online Multiplayer modes. The Adventure Mode is the meaty “story” portion of the game. A paper-thin plot acts as an excuse to tear through five monster-infested zones of suburbia. Each zone contains four levels and makes for a decent chunk of play time. This is also the part of the game where players collect monster tokens, upgrade weapons, and attempt to collect most of the very creative achievements. Unfortunately, the Adventure Mode only supports local multiplayer and is not playable over Xbox Live. The online multiplayer offering takes place in arena type environments separate from the adventure.

Lack of an online adventure mode is a significant omission considering top down action games like Champions: Return to Arms have supported online multiplayer since PS2.

It’s also a shame because Monster Madness was clearly designed to be played by more than one person at a time. The number of enemies, items, and hidden goodies packed into every environment is pretty impressive. The thing is – wandering around to grab (or kill) everything isn’t nearly as fun by yourself. Without the tension of beating your friends to pick up an item the game quickly devolves into a repetitive hack n’ slash affair. Getting people together on the same 360 is preferable, but this presents its own problems — like a camera that has to pull way back to capture all of the action on screen.

I’ve always enjoyed a good dungeon crawler, but in this title even the hacking and slashing has its share of problems. There are four characters in Monster Madness, each one fitting neatly into a high school typecast of geek, stoner, cheerleader, and goth. They have unique special attacks and melee weapons, but they play nearly identically. Players move their character with the left analog stick, turn with the right stick, and attack using the right trigger. Projectiles are launched with the left trigger, the bumpers cycle each type of weapon, and clicking R3 or L3 causes a character to jump forward or straight up respectively. Nearly every command feels loose and slightly unresponsive.

Why is movement and turning handled separately? In a game where melee combat is the default attack shouldn’t a character always face the direction they are walking? This turns out to be one of many questionable control decisions. Of course when you actually hit an enemy it is often unsatisfying; it’s hard to pin down, but the combat lacks a certain punch and enjoyment. Even driving a vehicle, which should be as simple as hitting the gas and steering, feels wrong. With varying camera angles and vehicles that get caught on every obstacle, it’s infinitely more difficult than it should be. At least there isn’t a timed driving sequence that consistently ends in death. Oh wait, there is. Whether it’s a car, an ATV, or a UFO, the controls are unresponsive or overly complicated.

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