Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $0.95

Features:

• Acquire weapon parts for upgrades by defeating enemies and exploring your environments
• Find abandoned vehicles, outfit them with deadly weapons, and ride in them to overpower foot-bound foes
• Fight your way through 5 unique environments like Suburban Nightmare, High School Hell and The Shopping Maul, each with deranged Boss Monsters
• Interact with the environment and use physics to your advantage - build barricades, throw large objects and more
• Killer graphics with advanced shading and rendering, with dynamically lit & shadowed worlds

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine	Electronic Gaming Monthly	Play

Customer Reviews:

.... Yikes [Posted on 2007-07-07]
I picked this up due to the cosmetic (and somewhat implied) similarities to the SNES classic, Zombies Ate My Neighbors. There are similarities, like plot (which is your cut and paste, cartoony zombie attacks the city type of story), and that's sufficient for a games like these.

I'll go over the good first:

The menus and graphics are very well done. The game has a caroony manga sort of style, which isn't terrible. Bright colors and misproportioned details reign. It's a decent enough look that, again, ties into its "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" predecessor.

The gameplay is very fast paced. Your character moves like an olympic track star. This helps, since there are usually dozens of enemies on the screen at any given time.

The game gives a nod to oldschool non-FPS run and gun style gameplay, a genre that, while abused by horrible software producers during the PS-2/X-Box era, shouldn't have fallen into obscurity and needs proper titles to revive it.

As mentioned, the plot is your standard, lukewarm "Zombies are attacking the city" story. The comic style cutscenes are kinda swank, and if you get tired of watching them, the esc key speeds you into the battle.

Now for the bad:

This game simply isn't optimized for the PC. Framerate suffers tremendously even at moderate resolutions, and as more happens on screen this problem is further accented. I am running this game with a Geforce 8800 GTS, 2 gigs of RAM, and a 2.2x2 Athlon64 and I'm experiencing considerable slow down at 1200x960 on medium(I think that's the res I'm using) and I'm sorry, the visuals aren't pretty enough to not run smoothly at that res. This appears to be another example of Micro$oft porting 360 titles horribly to the PC; my advice if you have your heart set on trying this is to find a demo and wait for patches.

Though the controls add a frantic appeal and overall are good, they are simply too fast and end up making the game feel sloppy. Instead of moving like a teenager, your character jumps around the screen like the Flash on speed. I think the fast controls actually damage the gameplay as they make it too easy for the player to get out of bad situations. Slowing the characters down might have made the controls feel more solid and added some challenge.

The weapons, by and large, are stupid. Shotguns made out of plumbing pipe, even if you're going for the "I'm desperate to use anything I can find as a weapon," just aren't appealing.

Character design is pretty horrible. You can play a hippy, a cheerleader, a goth chick, or a computer nerd. I understand this is an attempt at levity, but the models aren't designed well and if they were going for a goofy look, it's too overdone.

I have not messed around with the multiplayer function yet, but you cannot play the story mode with other players online. This would be awkward since you can choose the level you want to play singularly, therefore the game does not flow. If you have your PC hooked up to a television and are willing to buy controlers, you can play with friends on the same system. Failing to use the internet for Co-op play really is a dealbreaker for this game.

In closing, I'm not terribly happy with this purchase. Admittedly, I've only played through the first 5 or so levels, but I refuse to soldier on through this game until it is optimized for the PC. Even on a more robust system it is a choppy, mediocre mess. My advice to anyone considering this purchase for the PC; download "Shadowgrounds" from steam for less than half the price of this; it's very similar in design and is a much more traditional run-and-gun game.

Where's the Unreal Editor [Posted on 2007-07-24]
Since this game looked like a bad Xbox 360 port (and it was) I bought it totally for the new Unreal Editor which was prominantly advertised on the box as being included. If it was not as far as I could tell. Customer service never returned my E-mail asking about it.

If you are looking for a sneak peak at the new Unreal editor, buy "Roboblitz", not this sorry XBox port.

Good fun, but lacks customization [Posted on 2007-08-24]
The mood of the game is campy fun and I like the cut-scene animations that are thrown in here and there. The graphics are great at 1920x1200 with High quality textures. However, the controls are limiting since I can't map a mouse button to do what I want. I don't prefer the WASD controls, so I usually use the RMB to move forward. I went to remap the "UP" key from "W" to RMB and..... NOTHING!
I've decided that the entertainment value is worth dealing with this shortcoming though.
The monsters are pretty fun to fight, especially since you can outrun most of them to find cover and plan your assault.

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