June 8, 2010
Cuboom! I choose you!
Remember when Pokemon first hit it big, and suddenly, everyone had to have a Pokemon clone? You couldn’t walk into a store without tripping over 14 games that were trying to replicate Pokemon’s success. This has mostly died down now, of course, although every so often someone gives it a try (a recent example would be Spectrobes, I’d think). Monster Racers is one of those tries.
Strangely enough, I can’t find a website for this game. It was published by Koei, but the internet is treating it like it just appeared out of nowhere. I certainly hadn’t heard of it until Val mentioned it, and I threw it on my Gamefly queue at random. When it showed up, I was incredibly surprised. The game is really competent. It’s core idea is, perhaps, stretched a little thin, but what’s there is a really good game. I could see a younger version of myself really getting into it.
The basic story is that, at some point, people found Pokemon. I mean, monsters. The one thing all these monsters had in common was that they love to run. I mean, like, seriously love to run. So, of course, people race them. You’re either a boy or an underage cheerleader girl who wants to be the best Monster Racer in the world, and beat the Star Seven! So you go out on a quest to do that.
Instead of fighting, though, you race. Now, I had this originally described to me as Pokemon meets Mario Kart, but honestly, it’s a bit more Pokemon meets Canabalt. You can slow down and even run backwards, unlike Canabalt, but that’s mostly to your detriment. You’re mostly running full speed forward, jumping over gaps and dodging things and other racers. If you jump on top of another racer, or ram them from behind, you stun them for a moment. As you run, you also build up a Turbo meter, which you can use to pull off a move that’s unique for each monster, but normally involves blasting forward at an even faster pace for awhile.
The game is constantly pulling beats from Pokemon. There’s a definite “got to catch them all” mentality to the monsters, as you get a Handbook, which is basically a Pokedex, that will put a little star next to monster’s names that you’ve caught when you encounter them. To capture them, you have your monster slow down like crazy to fire their MonStar (I wish I was making that name up, ugh) in a random race to make friends with them. It’s really, really easy, and there’s no reason you won’t capture every single monster you meet on the first try.
Still, it gives you a reason to want to do the random races. They are different, but they do get tedious. It seemed like the designers knew this, though, and put in several features to try to make the game more friendly. One feature is that you don’t have to complete a full race against wild Monsters. If you pull ahead of them by a certain length, they give up, and you win. This makes random races take 20-30 seconds, instead of the 2 to 3 minutes a full race would take. This is nice. It’s also obscenely easy to dodge random races as you walk around. Other Monster Racers don’t do the eye thing like in Pokemon. You have to challenge them. You can also see random monsters on the map, and they move very slowly in obvious patterns, so they’re easy to dodge.
All that would be great, but the problem is that you do need to keep doing those random races to level up your monsters so that they can be fast enough for the various cups and whatnot you need to complete to become the best racer. Thanks for trying, game designers, but you didn’t quite nail it.
Overall, though, I was shocked and impressed by Monster Racers. If you were to play it for, say, maybe 15 minutes a day, I doubt it would get old anywhere near as fast as it did for me. (I put in like… 6 hours, most of that in one sitting, so it got stale quick.) Hell, if you modified the racing a little to be even more Canabalt, I bet you could get this game on the iPhone and make a mint. It’s pretty charming and cool. If you ever see it in a bargain bin somewhere, pick it up. It’s certainly worth bargain bin prices. If I could have kept it for that price from Gamefly, I totally would have.