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While walking home one day, an unnamed hero falls into a black hole and is teleported to Ovest Town on the planet Battalia. For reasons unknown, he is suddenly given pet monsters to train for the purpose of defeating Professor Mad Dog Lunatic, the villain who teleported him to this planet. And you are the unnamed hero. OK!Generic and unsubstantial plot aside, Monster Saga is an interesting creature raising game in the same vein as Monster Rancher and Pokémon. My expectations of Art Logic's latest monster training diversion started out very high, especially after viewing the fantastic art and critter design. The idea of bright green, banana-chucking monkeys duking it out across a beautiful hand painted background really appealed to me! The game features over 20 monsters to collect and train, 20 missions, 12 side quests and all the normal objectives found in this genre. However, Monster Saga's overall make-up is inherently flawed and mind-numbingly boring.
Upon pressing the "New Game" button, the player skims through a lengthy, useless tutorial that gives a horrible exposition of the game mechanics. Immediately, he is introduced to the battle system. These full-out monster brawls are actually automatic screen pushers in which he has no control over his monsters. All he can do is plan for war before throwing his mindless beasts into combat. Pet interaction is reduced to upgrades, quests and side quests, all of which require the player to wait several seconds before seeing the results. Quests are available every year at the same time. They reward food and money for their completion, but the player may only send one monster on any given quest. Specific conditions limit the monsters allowed to quest, which usually require upgrading stats to a certain level. There is also the success rate to keep in mind, to see if the monster can complete the task at hand. Tournaments are available to rank up the player’s breeding license, opening up even more possibilities to explore and upgrade.
While all this sounds cool, it is actually just another example of a good concept poorly executed. Frequent ad interruptions add to the already horrendous loading times, battles move at a snail's pace, and there are no options to rearrange the monsters in your party, or even change your character name. Monster Saga got all the little things wrong, the time-saving buttons that skip pointless scenes and graphics. Ranged units are inexplicably overpowered, and you can easily breeze through the game with four ranged Level 5 monsters. There are no healers, no way to prioritize attacks, and the antagonists are represented by boring blocks of text instead of respectable pictures or cutscenes. Perhaps Monster Saga's greatest flaw is its tedious slowness, which may turn away even the most patient gamers. The only worth to be found in such a game is in the collectible monsters. However, you have to play through the game a ridiculous six times over to obtain a full bestiary, since New Game+ deletes all your data instead of keeping your monsters! Monster Saga is a commendable effort to replicate the successes of past monster trainer classics in a flash game medium. However, it is plagued with several flaws, bugs, and glitches that seriously dampen its potential and transform the game into a chore.
Defend Your Nuts is somewhat misleading title for a entertaining defense game that pits your mouse-clicking prowess against massive hordes of rabbits, bees, giants, orcs, skeletons led by an evil wizard. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Our squirrel hero is defending his three precious acorns with only a bow and arrow. The controls are simple: you press, hold, and release the left-click mouse button to control the trajectory of your shot. Collect loot and ammo by moving the cursor over them, and take out the bad guys with repeated clicking. Headshots will ensure that the baddies take max damage.Coins that are dropped by defeated monsters allow you to obtain some more weapons after several days. Within a few in-game weeks' time, you may find yourself firing a sniper rifle, cocking a shotgun, and or launching rockets from an overpowered bazooka. There are also land mines and a giant fence available for purchase. All weapons and defense mechanisms can be upgraded to be even more effective. Be sure to stock up for the final battle against that dastardly malicious wizard that is behind this nutty invasion!
In spite of this game's polish, it gets old after playing several levels, especially when you really start upgrade your arsenal. Luckily, Defend Your Nuts is just the right length to maintain the average gamer's interest. The cool visuals and sounds add an undeniably awesome touch, and the unique concept feels just right for a defense game. Defend Your Nuts is a quick fix for any trigger-happy action fan!
At first glance, Death vs. Monstars 2 seems much too similar to its prequel to warrant a higher rating or to be considered a better game. However, GameReclaim's latest arena shooter is a tremendous improvement while still maintaining the original's intense, frantic gameplay. The goal of each level is to destroy all enemy waves while avoiding both your foes and incoming fire. Along with 15 brand-new stages and 4 bosses to shoot down, there's also several challenge levels and a score attack mode thrown into the mix, providing you with hours of frenetic fun!Death vs. Monstars has always been known for its mouse-only control scheme, which once again makes a comeback in DvM2. Death automatically fires in the opposite direction in which you move. Love it or hate it, the controls still work, even though it's sometimes tough to aim. Thankfully, holding the left mouse button allows you to strafe while locking your fire in one direction.
You can spend money dropped by the monstars at the shop to buy weapons, upgrades, and skins. It's always interesting to see Death with a top hat! You can even purchase some unique abilities, such as a shield, bullet-time, the destructive death ray. A common complaint is that there's no coin magnet, but this adds to the challenge of maxing out your upgrades, and farming easier levels for cash isn't difficult. Another gripe is the lack of an auto-pause option when your mouse goes offscreen, which is especially frustrating during a boss fight or when swarms of enemies are coming in from all sides. Sadly, all the stages feel very similar, and there's little to no variation in these levels. All this being said, DvM2 is a great game with minimal lag in spite of its chaotic appearance. Highly recommended to all shoot-em-up enthusiasts!
Notebook Wars 3 is a commendable shoot-em-up experience from Francisco Ferreres and Coolbuddy Games. Although it's unremarkably similar to the previous titles in the series, NW3 still adds a few interesting elements that make it a total blast to play for at least half an hour. Featuring the original hand-drawn art, a survival mode and a plethora of new-fangled enemies, weapons, and add-ons, this is the biggest and most action-packed Notebook Wars yet! Gliding across grid paper and launching radioactive sausages from your colourful flying fort has never been so fun!
But before you get to launching those sausages, you'll need to visit the Hangar, purchase some weapons, and customize your ship. You earn money by shooting down enemies and collecting the spoils. Other more elusive pickups include health kits, screen-clearing bombs that annihilate every enemy in sight, and the ultra-rare gold bullions. Bullions are ridiculously difficult to obtain and you could go for hours without finding enough bullions to buy anything decent. Up to two add-ons can be applied to each ship, but they cannot be removed or sold. As far as gameplay goes, what really drives the player is the huge variety of ships and weapons available for purchase. You'll definitely want to see what each weapon does at first, but once you see them demonstrated by your foes, you may decide that saving money for the more powerful guns is a better option.
Sadly, both the graphics and the gameplay have barely changed from its predecessors. NW3 suffers from a glaring lack of interesting bosses and creative stage design. The overall slowness of each level might hinder people from finishing the game; once you played about four levels, you've pretty much seen it all. Although there is a "Frenetic Mode" that supposedly makes the game more difficult, it actually plays at a decent speed with the exact same enemy patterns. After switching to Frenetic once, the sluggish Normal Mode is almost unbearable. A monotonous soundtrack does not compliment this at all, and it seriously grates on your ears within a few minutes of playing. Those boring blips and beeps that are used for sound effects forced me to hit Mute more than once.In the end, Notebook Wars 3 is not without its flaws, and what it really lacks is something that marks it as different, something that makes it stand out from the rest of the shoot-em-ups out there. It's a fun game, but it just missed the mark from being truly great.
Far in the east, a wicked, ancient dragon reawakens, disturbing Winterfront's peaceful, snowless winters and summoning the forces of evil to run down the land's not-so beautiful forests and fields. To stop their impending doom, the inhabitants of Old Rock Castle take the most logical course of action and hire mercenaries to do the dirty work for them...and you just happen to be the mercenary leader. Are you up to the task? Elite Games' Hired Heroes takes you on a time-consuming humdrum of a journey across the land of Winterfront to confront and slay this evil dragon. It's not uncommon to find another RPG with a pitiful, under-developed plot, but sadly, its gameplay does not quite make up for its lack of story.There are twelve, unmemorable heroes to unlock, but you may only use a select few in each level. Conveniently, eight of these heroes are simply stronger palette swaps of the first four. Before engaging in battle, you are given a certain amount of points to hire heroes, and there's no way to increase this total. You may then choose up to three relics to aid you in battle. Your prowess in combat is not determined by level-ups or even abilities, but by these very relics. Relics can enhance your strength, defense, health, regen, and move/ability range, but some relics also decrease other stats. They can all be purchased at the shop in the World Map, but you can't get any enemies to drop items. This system ends up being much more unhelpful than useful, especially since farming for money is miserably slow. Revisiting beaten levels is hardly worth it because it gets you mere pennies for winning and absolutely nothing after a loss. In Hired Heroes, money equals power!
It goes without saying that the game drags. Battles are turn-based ordeals in which you click your characters, move 'em, attack, and end your turn. You can choose to end your turn early, but the system is set up so that it's hard to switch smoothly between moving and attacking. There are some cool strategies to pull off, such as hiding ranged heroes behind melee units or using your area healers to attack and heal units at the same time. However, the overpowered, regenerating enemies have intense splash damage, range and raw power, which makes for a despicably tough nightmare of an RPG.As I said before, the shallow background story could have been overlooked if the dry, turn-based gameplay had made up for it. It doesn't help that the in-game dialogue is riddled with unsightly typos and incredibly cheesy jokes. Instead, the lack of polish and replayability make this game almost entirely un-fun. While the 2D sprite artwork is commendable, the boring world names, such as "Small Village" and "North Forest", accurately describe the Hired Heroes' overall blandness. It's annoying how your strength is mainly based on relics, and if you choose the wrong ones, it's really hard to get more money. Hired Heroes just felt like it was missing something, an extra oomph to make it different from the average RPG adventure. You shouldn't play this for more than an hour unless you really want to see what that dragon looks like, and that's not quite worth it.
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