Video game two hundred and twenty nine: Monday Night Combat

Video game review number two hundred and twenty nine in my 365 Games in 365 Days project is "Monday Night Combat".

Smash TV meets Call of Duty is the best way to describe this one.

This is another one of the "Summer of Arcade" titles, and although I had heard little about it leading up to the release, this week has brought all sorts of news online about how fun it's supposed to be. I jumped right into the multiplayer mode after the tutorial (because basically, that's where the meat of this game is) and I can see how it would be a lot of fun...if I were playing with friends.

You begin the game as your choice of character class. There are Assault people (all around fighters), Gunners (my favorite so far, because they are tanks), Assassins (basically ninjas) and several other classes I haven't tested out yet. You get thrown into an area against the other players and a bunch of bots.

Each team has a "moneyball" they are trying to project, and the other team must kill it to get cash and score points. Along the way, you defend your moneyball by building turrets, "bots" (which are killer robots you can spend cash earned in game on)...and of course just regular old death match killing.

I like the game concept, and it's actually pretty fun...but I can see how it's one of those games that's only going to be fun if you have a bunch of people online to play it with (preferably a team with microphones that you can talk to).

My first game was spent entirely in silence (as was the second) with a group of strangers. Because the game was released today, it was easy to find matches, and I got a couple of achievements. I think the achievements are fairly doable in this game, but I'm not sure how eager I'll be to complete without a team to talk to. Attacks on the opposing team's moneyball should be coordinated with a team....and mine was content to just blast away without any thought to strategy or teamwork.

It's not a bad game at all, it's just something that I think I'd have a lot more fun with if my friends were playing as well.

Overall Score? 7/10 So far...I'd say this is better than most (if not all) of the multiplayer shooters I've played on Xbox Live Arcade, but it's far below the bar for the quality you would expect in a regular full title. It's no Halo, Call of Duty, Bad Company, Splinter Cell or even Grand Theft Auto as far as shooters go....but for an arcade game, a quick pick up and play....it's pretty good.

Achievements:

Updated 1-13-2011. Looks like I forgot to add these into the review, but I did get a couple. Wow...I haven't played this since launch. That's kind of sad.