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Welcome to Monday Night Combat, the blood sport de jure of a corporate run future where clones battle against robots and clones alike. Once again the future looks pretty bleak if we are bringing back the coliseum but I guess a few thousand years doesn’t really remove the blood lust and self destructive appetite of the human race. This time the battlefield is a class based third person shooter with a healthy dose of tower defense thrown in for good measure.

The first time you fire up the game you get a crash course in playing as ‘The Assault’. The controls are all pretty standard for a run and gun shooter so if you played a shooter before you should pick it up nice and easy. Well it would be easy except for all the skills, development, and class interaction that take place.

It breaks down easy to start with, each of the six classes (Assault, Gunner, Tank, Sniper, Support and Ninja) has four ’stats’ each, killing things get you money which lets you upgrade the stats. There is a grey class stat which is the general aptitude of your clone the other three: blue, yellow and red are skills that can be used with a cool down. Each Classes skill helps define their role and include things such as flight, cloaking sprinting and dashing through to hacking turrets and air strikes. 

Each class has a pair of weapons suited to they intended style, Ninjas have a sword and ninja star gun, Tanks have a Jet Engine gun and a rail gun, there’s a Heal/Hurt gun sniper rifles and so on. Some weapons have alternate fire and where there is no alternate fire there is a Grapple attack with is used point blank and is devastating. Again care has been taken to define the classes by their equipment.

Rounding out a trinity of player interactions is the tower defense element, there are 4 different towers: Laser Blazer, Long Shot, Rocket and one that has casts a slowing Aura. They are all upgradeable and all work best in different situations.

There are just two game modes in Monday Night Combat, Blitz and Cross fire:

Blitz is the ever popular horde mode where up to 4 people co-op against an army of robots and try to defend the Money Ball for the duration. The more people you have the harder this task is going to be and proper use of towers is just as important as which class you’re using. Playing it solo is pretty easy although it’s too quiet. Throw in a couple mates and it livens up and teamwork is the only way you will survive.

Cross Fire is the versus offering and it’s not too bad. This mode is up to 6v6 both teams have robots and can build towers. The Goal is to take out the Enemies Money ball before they take out yours. The bots will follow paths to the enemy base but must be escorted if you want them to survive, each class can spawn one of the special bots to help with the attack.

Monday Night Combat’s well lit symmetrical maps and bold cell-rendered characters are well suited to style of game. The Arenas are well thought out and can provide all sorts of fun regardless of you class. I think there are a few balance issues with the classes but that could be attributed to the unfamiliarity with the classes and my lone wolf approach to shooters. The Achievements are all pretty easy to get and can be boosted without much effort. I noticed little to no lag as the only Kiwi in a room of Americans.

Monday Night Combat is good value for money and is pretty fun to boot. It’s a nice basic shooter that is begging for some DLC and due to the comical nature of the game they could throw in some real odd ball stuff. Your average Sunday morning cartoon has more graphic violence so it’s not entirely unsuitable for a younger audience. I am rating it hard because it is rather light on content and I am expecting no freebies if DLC is released.

Reviewed on: XBox 360

Available on: XBox 360

Reviewed by:

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