Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia Xbox 360 Review

Monster Madness is a comedy horror action platforming overhead shooter game. In the style of gauntlet zombies ate my neighbors or Hercules adventure. Beginning to be played alone or in co-op with up to four people locally. The basic premise is that Zach and his fellow high school friends Carrie, Andy, and Jennifer are the sole survivors when their town becomes overrun with zombies which is werewolves gremlins and many other kinds of monsters. So they take upon themselves to come to arms with various homemade unconventional weapons in attempt to rid the town of the plague of fiends.

The graphics in monster madness are decent keeping in mind that the game came out in 2006 environments are nicely detailed and texture colors are often rich and vibrant, however lighting can sometimes be pretty poor for instance in the mall or graveyard levels and most character models the game could certainly use more detail when compared to the game's occasional comic book cut scene. One great thing about the game is that the art design is very inspired every character has a personality that you can see just by looking at them, and it's always a treat every time a new characters introduced because this. One annoying thing I find that the graphics is that every character has a shiny gloss on them which just looks unrealistic. The camera system in monster madness is unusual when playing single player the camera can take the overhead Skyview or by pressing the Y. button can zoom in and a third person view behind character. The thing is monster madness were a straight shooter and all he had to do was aim and kill enemies for over a camera will be fine but however since they're often tricky platforming elements or instances where you have to sidestep quick melee attacks the third person camera is usually better as well as being more immersive. Unfortunately at certain points the game they can't be fixed assert certain angle usually overhead and when playing multiplayer locally you were forced to use the overhead camera. There are a lot of problems with the overhead camera and it can occasionally become stuck in a fixed position, it is also often times very difficult to judge the depth which could getting hit or unfair deaths. The frame rate is also affected in multiplayer usually anyhow many things on screen are moving an example of this would be to play the first level on demand is difficult to say that allow the boss keeps on summoning zombies until they fill the level and the frame rate chugs about five frames per second. Still a slowdown doesn't veer his head very often ends for some reason since it's very hard to convince someone to play the game with you most people won't encounter this problem.

You can play as one of four characters the aforementioned Zach Andy Kerry Jennifer. Zach and Kerry seemed to move a bit faster and certainly jump higher than Andy and Jennifer otherwise besides each character's unique melee weapons and voice clips there appears to be no difference between them. When you start the game you are unarmed and are forced to scavenge for a melee weapon. In the second level you'll meet Larry tools the game shopkeeper and advice guru. If you collect enough the junk lying around levels and pay him monster tokens the game's currency Larry will bestow upon you new weapons. Weapons that actually have long-range and are safe to use against some of the more deadly enemies. You'll want to acquire the nail gun as soon as possible. After each chapter in the game usually consisting of three levels Larry Shop will gain new more powerful weapons to purchase in addition this each weapon has three levels with the third upgrade being the most powerful. The problem with the system is that it takes far too many random items to make a single weapon. For example often you'll need 50 buckets 100 forks, and 10 dark matters, you might find 30 or so buckets are forks on a level but dark matters are a rare item in the last two go through level 15 five times to get enough dark matter. You'll find yourself repeatedly playing through the same frustrating and boring stages over and over again just to get enough supplies to upgrade your weapons. To make matters worse inventory between characters and not share now this makes sense in multiplayer but in single player it's just annoying. Even though you might purchase a level 3 boomerang as Zack, you'll still have to collect all supplies as the other characters nor to use weapons.  Now granted you don't have to buy all the weapons or play as all the characters, but how would you know what weapons are good before purchasing them in each characters made a weapon makes them easier or more difficult to play as the depending on which ones you've found. Which brings me to another point wireless only done in the game garbage items seemingly only to an existing to rob you of your hard-earned items and waste your time. For example the shield gun cell phone teaser defibrillator in Bee miner are all almost entirely useless. The best weapons are the nail gun boomerang radioactive flashlight and the pipe shotgun. Some weapons would've been good if the game didn't have friendly fire on yourself splash damage on bazooka to makes sense, but how come the ricochet effect of this CD launcher can also hurt you to player, this is maddening considering how close quarters most the stages of the game are, it's just not practical to use it regardless of how effective it is. Another problem with the game besides tedious weapon grinding, is that the game is far too difficult. Now they did release a patch that fixed the controls to an extent and made the game a little easier. But levels still have many one-hit or instant deaths caused by cheap environmental hazards and ruthless enemies that gang up on you vacuuming up your health and attempting to push you off platforms into bottomless pits. In fact the game is so difficult I recommend playing it on the easiest difficulty setting child's play on your first play through men graduating to thriller and eventually the absurd madness difficulty. The problem is that certain items only appear on certain difficulties even if you're playing on child's play the game will still be pretty hard requiring you to upgrade your weapons meaning you'll have to venture to higher difficulties before you even begin the lowest one which is really just a bad design choice. For instance I recommend getting as far as you can child's play then replaying the first two levels on horror or madness [madness difficulty by the way can't be unlocked until you beat the game once unknowingly.] Until you can could afford to buy a decent weapons. Gratingly the game rewards you for being levels about the without dying with considering how many glitch in random deaths there are this game is nearly impossible.

Despite my myriad of complaints I do genuinely enjoy playing monster madness and storyline is fairly interesting and due to the constant struggle to fend off even common enemies, the game feels intense and slaying monsters satisfying. Boss fights are to be feared and are memorable . I enjoyed most of them except for some of the puzzle centric ones that can only be dispatched with a certain item or when standing on a certain spot . The level as I is quite varied with many diverse locations which encourages you to continue with the game. They're even a few vehicles sections including a dune buggy, a TV and are hovercraft, although there is one of obnoxious section at the end of the game. There's also quite a bit of humor in the game, while not quite being laugh out loud funny at least for my taste, the game comes close many times, usually revolving around lampooning horror or sci-fi clichés.

There is also a rather confident competent multiplayer mode in the title with many different gameplay's modes. Including death match team death match capture the flag King of the hill and unique to the game monster fest. Which is a variant of last man standing which with each player who is out turning into a monster and then hunting the remaining human players. Unlike the single player and multiplayer mode can be played online with up to 16 players. I do however notice that the larger maps seem to be a lot better than the four player map's as the four player ones have far too many environmental hazards making the map killed more people than the actual players.

Music is decent though not super memorable voice acting is frequent and am gameplay is improved by enemy audio cues. Solid dialogue and it's delivery can be grating sometimes however but do subtitles this shouldn't be too much for problem since you can always turn the sound off.

As much as I like replay monster madness in his underrated I think it is I can't in good conscious gift to gain anything above a 7/10 on a good day because it is simply too hard to glitchy into poorly designed to be a true classic game however if you're looking for a challenge and you love a good hand/shooter or collect a thon with multiplayer humorous story you should definitely check out monster madness especially considering how cheap it is.