REVIEW
Monsters VS Aliens
By Shaun Hatton - April 13th, 2009
Monsters VS Aliens is the latest computer-animated family fun film from Dreamworks, who have a history of making their characters grin uncomfortably. The videogame based on the flick is out now on every current console imaginable, ensuring that whatever deck you’ve got sitting at home, you and your children will be able to play this on it. The game focuses on four chapters, which are presumably based on the events in the film.
It should come as no surprise that the game is definitely aimed at a youth audience. Difficulty, therefore, is kept at a minimum even during the most hectic of boss fights. This doesn’t mean the whole game is a cakewalk, mind you. There are still plenty of platforming puzzles and interesting game mechanics for more mature gamers to enjoy (provided they’re still young at heart).
The premise of Monsters VS Aliens is just about summed up nicely in its title. In the game, the player controls the monsters on their missions against man and then alien forces. The plot is split up into chapters, which each chapter split up further into scenes. Each scene has players taking control of different monsters in the team. While the team has five characters, however, the single player game only allows you to use one of three of them. Each monster in this sense has his/her own scenes – so you won’t be able to play as another monster in someone else’s stage. In fact, each stage environment is built perfectly to suit the monster that you control during it. So who are these monsters?
First up, we have Susan, a human who was hit by an alien meteor the day of her wedding. Rather than being smooshed by it, she instead grows to giant proportions and against her will, takes on the nickname Ginormica (though she still prefers to be called Susan, and refuses to accept she’s a monster despite her use of military vehicles as rollerskates). Her stages involve auto-scrolling “race” styled game-play with plenty of dodging, stunt skating, and body checking of enemies. In certain instances such as boss fights, quick-time events are used as a means of both dodging attacks and redirecting them at the boss enemy.
Next is B.O.B. He’s a blue gelatinous mass with an insatiable appetite (and despite his name, has no connection to the other videogame character, B.O.B. – who was actually really cool – but enough about him). B.O.B. can move along ceilings and walls and pass through grates. In instances where he needs to move across a grated floor, he needs to first swallow something solid so he doesn’t drip through. It’s a cool game-play mechanic that works very well in his levels. He can also perch himself on plasma ejectors and use his mouth to spit out the plasma balls like a sort of machine gun turret. B.O.B.’s stages are often large and feature moving, gravity-defying platforms and puzzles that make it somewhat tricky for him to get from start to finish.
The last of the playable characters is The Missing Link, who is some sort of half-fish, half-simian character. Please note: “The” is in fact part of his name. Throughout the game, no matter which stage you’re playing, secondary characters such as Dr. Cockroach will speak to you to give you tips on how to progress along the stages and bypass obstacles. When Cockroach talks to The Missing Link, regardless of whether it sounds right or not, he will always use the word “The” before “Missing Link.” One would think that a team of monsters that work closely with each other would come up with shorter, less confusing names for each other, but I guess it is kind of funny to hear Dr. Cockroach say stuff like, “Watch out for the lasers, The Missing Link!” The Missing Link possesses great strength and agility and his stages rely heavily on the “smash everything” mentality of gaming. Additionally there are elements of his scenes that brought back memories of early 3D platforming, notably Sonic’s enemy-smashing pounces and his being used as a pinball, bouncing from bumper to bumper automatically while collecting tokens.
Rounding out our team of five monsters is the maniacal Dr. Cockroach, who was bent on world domination before a lab accident transformed him into a mutant cockroach and Insectoraurus, who is a giant, somewhat stupid insect of Godzilla-like proportions. Dr. Cockroach is playable in the two-player mode of the game wherein the second player controls him via aiming a cursor to take out bad guys and collect Monster DNA (the game’s equivalent of currency, which in the DNA Lab section is used to unlock special features such as movie stills, audio commentary, and mini-game challenges). Insectosaurus, on the other hand, is relegated to being a background character in the scenes that he is in, sometimes even needing helping.
The story of Monsters VS Aliens is about as straightforward as one can expect from a game. Again, consider its target audience. In the first stage, our monster heroes are locked up in a secret government facility and must try to escape. They’re monsters, after all – the government can’t just let them run loose! After a failed breakout attempt that covers much of the base game-play utilized in later chapters, the monsters are actually released to do battle with a newer threat to humanity: the Aliens. Between stages we’re treated to animated cutscenes that progress the plot, while during stages we have loads of banter between characters that prove to be more humorous than plot-advancing. The banter also gets a little tedious, particularly after failed runs of certain sections, but this is to be expected given the genre of the game. Overall, the effect is that while playing, the humorous, action-packed story unfolds.
As previous mentioned, each stage is built to reflect and make use of a particular monster’s skill set. I’d go so far as to outright applaud the game’s producers for making creative use of already-established game mechanics to best showcase each monster’s moves. The Missing Link’s stages, centred on destruction, provide some of the best fun in the game. He can jump on turrets, use enemy defences against them, and undo the mechanical make-up of large enemies but unwinding bolts and otherwise breaking them down, component-by-component. Each chapter in the game centres on one common goal, which each scene offering a different angle at that goal’s completion. In what would otherwise be a random hodgepodge of game-play styles, the game’s narrative pulls everything together in such a way that it makes sense in the grand scheme of things (as farfetched as the concept is, admittedly).
Graphically, you’re not going to find anything that stretches the limits of your home console here, but the Xbox 360 version I played looked great, particularly in its display of special effects such as lasers and explosions. B.O.B.’s character design is simple, as he’s just a ball of slime with and eye, mouth, and two arms. Closer inspection reveals tiny air bubbles in his design – and when B.O.B. swallows enemies, they can be seen floating helplessly inside him until he chooses to either release them gently or spit them out with force, making a projectile of them. Ginormica’s scenes take place over larger environments with the player skating through rather quickly, but a casual glance around her shows the immediate surroundings to have enough detail to be believable for their part.
Monsters VS Aliens does well to establish itself as a fun, competent game despite its trappings of being a movie tie-in. Don’t let that fact fool you, however – there’s plenty to enjoy in this title, and I found it somewhat refreshing to step away from the more serious competitive nature of games geared at my demographic employ. It offers a decent amount of variety and unlockable content. While the game is a bit on the short side, it’s still longer than the movie that it’s based on, and one could always attempt to get better level scores to unlock more bonuses in the DNA Lab.
