June 13, 2011
Chomp is not a very good name for a monster.
Gamefly sent me Monster Tale.
I had heard a lot of good things about the game, as well as a lot of reservations, sort of like the previous game from that group, Henry Hatsworth. Still, I enjoy Metroidvanias and I wanted to give it a go, so rent I did!
I sent it back after about 2 hours of play.
I don’t know, it just seemed… bad. All the pieces were there. I was leveling up my little pet and he was evolving into different things. I was wandering around a map and getting abilities that let me access new parts of the map. Stuff was happening! Metroidvania!
However, there were just little things that bothered me.
The map design was really boring. Over on the Video Games Hot Dog, they talked about how the game was not designed in a smart way, where getting a power up opened a path that slid you back to where you were supposed to be, or took you along a route with a lot of new stuff to pick up. It was literally designed to have you go to one end of the map, then go back to the other, then go back to the first place. They said this, and within my short time playing the game, I was already seeing this. Traversing the map wasn’t fun on it’s own. That made me not want to keep going.
On top of that, the combat was kind of stupid. Enemies either took one single hit, or 5 million hits, and there was seemingly no in-between. This made said backtracking even more tedious, which was really unfortunate.
I put it down after a play session, and as I thought about it more, I realized I’d have to force myself to pick it up again. It’s not a bad game, perse. It has the elements of a game, and it doesn’t feel like it controls like shit or anything. It just wasn’t bringing anything special to the table. I was hoping for charm to really carry the game, and it just wasn’t there. Oh well.