Ripten Review: Monday Night Combat

Monday Night Combat is a class-based third person shooter that borrows elements from Team Fortress 2 and Defense of the Ancients and successfully melds them into a fun XBLA title with a unique feel that’s only slightly weighed down by some unfortunate difficulty and balancing issues.

Monday Night Combat is a future spectator sport where loss of human life is acceptable, if not encouraged. The player(s) must prevent their Moneyball from getting destroyed by the opposition, and there are multiple modes of play.  In Blitz, you and up to three teammates protect the Moneyball from wave after wave of several classes of robots. In Crossfire, two teams of six fight alongside their bot armies with the same objective.

There are six classes to choose from, and all are pretty self-explanatory. There’s the well-rounded assault class, the sniper, the assassin, the gunner, the tank, and the support guy who slightly resembles Mario. Each class has their own unique weapons and abilities, as well as three “endorsements,” which are similar to Call of Duty’s perk system.  There are gold, silver, and bronze endorsements, each respectively being more effective than the next.

You can also unlock custom classes, but the customization is pretty limited. You can pick a base class and apply any three endorsements, but those hoping to swap weapons and abilities will be disappointed. Still, there are a good number of endorsements, so it’s not completely without depth.

Blitz mode only has one arena (map), which sounds awful, but the truth is it can be so much fun that you won’t care until you’ve really played the arena to death. And even then, after not too long of a break, you’ll want to come back for more.

The upside to having a single map is that it gives you more time to perfect your strategy. Like Defense of the Ancients, the bots come in lanes, and you’ll have to build towers to defend the areas you aren’t currently covering. There are four types of towers which can be built on nubs all around the arena. Each can be upgraded twice and oftentimes you’ll have to decide whether it’s best to upgrade an existing tower or build a new one for coverage. In my experience, whatever you choose to do will be wrong.

There are five levels of difficulty in Blitz mode. The first level is a walk in the park, which is great for easing the player into the game. Bots will only come from the front two lanes, so as long as you build any turrets at all, you should be fine. It’s a great introductory difficulty. The second difficulty is a decent step up. The bots are now a bit tougher and they start coming from the side lanes as well as the front.

The third difficulty is where it all goes to hell. The difficulty ramps up a completely disproportionate amount. Bots are tougher still and they now come from the back lanes as well as the sides and the front. The real problem here is a lack of money. Without money, you can’t buy turrets. To get money, you have to kill bots; you get no money from bots that your turrets kill. However, bots are now tougher, which makes them harder to kill yourself before they get in range of your turrets. This results in less kills, which in turn gets you less money. It’s completely overwhelming. I’m not saying it’s too hard, because that’s up to each person who plays it. But it very well may be too much of a step up from the previous difficulty.

I couldn’t beat the third difficulty by myself easily, but finally did after I hopped online and got some teammates. I had a blast running from lane to lane, taking down robots and helping my team by upgrading turrets others had planted. It was a lot of fun. But I’m still not entirely convinced that you can beat the third tier on your own, much less the fourth and fifth tiers.

If you’re a fan of competitive gaming, Crossfire will be your drug of choice. It’s a whole different beast than Blitz with the addition of human opponents. You’re instructed to escort your bots as they make their way towards the enemy Moneyball, but players rarely do so,  ignoring the objective and deciding instead to play MNC like a deathmatch. This is less of a problem with the game and more of a problem with humanity. Though it’s slightly misleading to call it a problem, because sooner or later one valiant bot will make its way through and tear down the shield on a Moneyball, opening it up to damage from players. Then, they will come in force.

I mentioned in the opening paragraph that there were balancing issues, and boy are there ever. The biggest problem about the multiplayer balancing is that it doesn’t seem to be there. That’s not entirely true. Matchmaking won’t put all of the high level players on one team while the other team is populated by players in the single digit levels. But the problem is that they’re allowed in the same game together at all. The last game I played had one level six player and a level 59 player, a gap of 53 levels. That’s a pretty big gap. However, it may just be that there aren’t enough people playing MNC right now.

The other problem is that levels don’t really mean squat, because you can gain XP in single player. I didn’t actually play a Crossfire match until I was around level 10, so while it looked like I had cut my teeth, I had actually never played against a single human opponent. The entire matchmaking system just feels wonky and not very well thought out.

But much like my complaint about the single Blitz arena, the sheer fun that you’ll have with Monday Night Combat will make you forget about the matchmaking issues and the difficulty. In solo Blitz, I lost repeatedly, but that never stopped me from immediately firing up another game. And while getting creamed in Crossfire isn’t a lot of fun, it won’t last forever, and once you’ve got a few games under you belt, it won’t be much of a problem at all.

Monday Night Combat is far from perfect, but it’s one of the funner games on Xbox Live Arcade, and at $15 it’s an easy purchase. Uber Entertainment is definitely a developer to keep an eye on.

The Rundown

+ So much fun it should be illegal

+ Great value

+ Seriously a lot of fun

- Only one blitz arena

- Blitz difficulty ramps up too quickly

- Matchmaking isn’t very balanced

Monday Night Combat was developed by Uber Entertainment and was published by Microsoft Game Studios for the Xbox LIVE Arcade. The game released in the United States on August 11th 2010 with a retail price of 1200MSP. This copy was purchased by Ripten. Several hours were put into all game modes.