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Monsters Ate My Metropolis - A different take on destruction

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Monsters Ate My Metropolis - A different take on destruction

Monsters Ate My Metropolis is the sequel to Monsters Ate My Condo, but it shifts the action from a match-stuff puzzler to a rock-paper-scissors style card battler and deck builder.

It's an interesting shift, and the focus on taking down other player's cities and working your way up the leaderboards makes for an engaging experience.

The free to play here isn't too icky either, and the offbeat humour and silly giant monsters are all present and correct, but it doesn't quite capture the manic sensibilities of the original.

Big mother monsters

Essentially the game is a turn-based game of card-matching. Each round you play a monster card and the city you're scrapping against plays a city card.

There are four different colours, and they're stronger and weaker against different hues. You take it in turns playing the first card. You've got a choice of three each turn, and you're dealt a new one from your deck after the explosions and punches have happened.

Each card you play requires you to perform a tappy QTE. You might need to mash the screen to fill a bar, or stop a sliding point or expanding circle at just the right time.

You mangle each other until one of you runs out of health, get some loot and some XP, then do the whole thing again. Trying to work out what the computer is likely to lay when it's your turn to go first is part of the fun.

The slightly gross-out humour flows through the attacks. They see you throwing garlic, enlisting the help of extra-terrestrial cats, and chucking up streams of rancid green vomit. The monsters are cheeky and fun as well.

But there's not quite enough chaos here. It's a more measured game, and makes more concessions for its payment model, and that means it's not quite as much fun.

Kaiju

That's not to say that it's no fun at all, and the shift to a slower pace makes the game more tactical, and more accessible.

But it doesn't have that overarching sense of joy that rippled through the smashed towers of its predecessors

It's worth a crack, and it does fizz every now and then with good ideas, but fans of the original might find the new direction a little off-putting.

Monsters Ate My Metropolis - A different take on destruction

There's still something to Monsters Ate My Metropolis, but its different take on destruction isn't as immediate as its predecessor
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.