MONSTER MADNESS:
Battle for Suburbia
Published by:
SouthPeak Interactive
Developed by:
Artificial Studios &
IMMERSION Software & Graphics
XBOX 360 and PC
INTRODUCTION:
I’m not going to lie, although sometimes I just wish I could.
There are times as a reviewer that I feel as if I’m doing nothing but crapping
on everything I watch or play. Unfortunately, the fact is that this gig isn’t
all fun and games- we really have to go through a lot of bad stuff before we
find a diamond in the rough.
And so we have Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia, the
latest game to come across my desk. It’s in a rough, raunchy format, featuring
4-player all out multiplayer madness. It’s you (god forbid you play this alone)
and your buddies blasting through endless hordes of the undead – yep, that’s
right, zombies and other nastiness all over the place.
You’ll take hold of one of four disposable teens and you’re
tossed headfirst into this goofy (not played seriously) zombie world. Along the
way you’ll find a ton of weapons at your disposal, as you go through room after
room. You can also grab secret weapons, and eventually upgrade the ones you
have. Grab your shotgun; it’s going to be a long trip.
GAMEPLAY:
The gameplay is the absolute biggest problem with this game.
If Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia played okay, it’d be passable if you
could grab four buddies and just crank up the silly factor all night for a
once-through (you can’t even do that properly though, the multiplayer camera is
awful).
Unfortunately, Monster Madness really fails in the control
department and is nearly unplayable. Players move their character with the left
analog stick, turn with the right stick, and attack using the right trigger. I
mean, you have your projectiles launched with trigger buttons and clicking the
sticks will make you jump, but these controls are poorly mapped; it feels like
you have to wait a half a second before anything happens.
And the weapons are fairly cool, but the system sort of
sucks. First of all, the opportunities to upgrade your weapons come way too
sporadically and at strange times. You get “monster tokens” by killing monsters
(ingenious, I know), and then you eventually upgrade your crap weapon for a
better one. Unfortunately, the weapons you start with are often much better than
those you end up getting, and they can be pricy too.
The biggest sin here is that movement and turning are handled
with two different controls. The purpose of the game is to tear through armies
of monsters, and you can’t even do that properly, it’s ridiculous. Don’t even
get me started on the driving missions. Your thumbs are going to ache, and
you’re going to curse at the screen, begging your character to turn around to
face the enemy who is chipping away at your life. So, you’re going to die, a
lot. But even if you crank the difficulty down, it still doesn’t make this
clunky game any actual fun to play.
Gameplay: 4/10
GRAPHICS:
Monster Madness doesn’t look too bad. It uses the Unreal 3
engine (weird, eh?) and there’s often a lot going down on-screen. Textures are
simple but smooth, and there’s lots of explosions and general chaos at any given
time, which looks passable.
However, even in single player mode, you’ll notice a fair
amount of flickering and slowdown throughout the action- this is unacceptable
for an XBOX 360 game, especially one that plays and looks like a cheap Live
Arcade game.
Graphics: 5.5/10
AUDIO:
The voice acting is pretty awful in this game and within an
hour or two, you’re going to want to crank the volume way down, because it gets
really old, really fast. Re-pe-ti-tive, like the game itself.
The music is generic stuff, completely unremarkable and not
really memorable.
Audio: 5.5/10
FINAL VERDICT:
Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia is really a mediocre, sub-par, bargain
basement game. It’s cartoony and really tongue in cheek, and reminiscent of a
much better game, Zombies Ate My Neighbours, except with none of the fun or
originality. It does have a few moments and certain appeal, but let me tell you
that having to complete it for review purposes was a true test of patience and
endurance for me. If you can find this in a bin somewhere for ten bucks, pick it
up, play it with a buddy once, but beware- if you’re a controller smashing type,
you’ll have to pick up some new ones after you’re done.
FINAL SCORE: 5/10
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