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Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia

Seek an inner calm before playing

Almost universally, playing Monster Madness is maddening indeed. Progressing through a level takes time, especially if you're bent on collecting all of the spare parts. But this collection routine doesn't jive with gameplay that emphasizes speed over thoroughness. The gameplay is bipolar and is made all the more frustrating by a horrible checkpoint save system. Dying is a frequent occurrence, particularly in difficult boss fights and unavoidable Monster Fests, where you're herded in with zombies and must kill all the enemies within a certain time limit.

Health is replenished by purchasing and consuming soda from vending machines, but the sugary elixir can't be stockpiled. So when health is low, it's a mad rush to the nearest vending machine with zombies in tow. Since the checkpoint system kicks you back to the last checkpoint after dying, you're forced to replay large chunks of the level and re-collect items. There's no excuse for not using a proper save system. Finally, if you have to step away from the game without reaching the end of a level, you're forced to start from the beginning, regardless of how many checkpoints you reached. Stupid.

In addition to selling weapons and items, Larry Tools sells Monster Amulets. These special jewels give you the ability to temporarily mutate into a powerful monster capable of mass destruction. Larry hocks different amulets depending on the level, and the resulting transformation adds variety to the gameplay. Detracting from the gameplay, on the other hand, is the abysmal vehicle combat implementation. There are watercraft, wheeled vehicles and even a UFO and Mech suit. These sound like fun, but they're mostly frustrating due to the poor handling and wonky controls, which vary from vehicle to vehicle. Some have multiple seats as well, so playing solo requires switching between the driver's seat and the turret seat to fire at enemies, which wastes valuable time. But the vehicle scenarios do break up the monotony of smash-and-grab, and that's not a bad thing.

With its single-player shenanigans (too-difficult bosses, multi-seat vehicles and hordes of enemies) Monster Madness seems well-suited for multiplayer. A number of multiplayer options are available, including a few spins on deathmatch and team-based gameplay, but none are very compelling without an in-game server browser. The game seems tailored to cooperative multiplayer in adventure mode, but it's noticeably absent from the online options and is available only on the local machine. I don't know about you, but I generally don't invite friends over to huddle around my monitor for hours of PC multiplayer action. Multiplayer deathmatch modes suffer from a view that's so zoomed out you'll be fortunate to recognize anything on the screen. Across the board, the multiplayer is worse than the single-player game and even more frustrating.

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