Monday Night Combat (XBLA) Review

Cartoon violence is always cool. Especially when you get to control the violence with the press of buttons on an Xbox controller. Luckily, Uber Entertainment and Microsoft Games Studios are allowing you to do that now with the latest Summer of Arcade 2010 release Monday Night Combat.

Monday Night Combat (MNC) brings cartoon-styled look to the Third-Person Shooter genre much in the style of the Team Fortress games. The game combines an excellent sense of humor with easy to play gaming to create a solid addition to the Summer of Arcade library.

Monday Night Combat brings some serious arena combat to the table in their game modes, which combine third-person shooting with Defense of the Ancients-style strategy, which unfortunately, get a little tedious thanks to a lack of variation in the game mode. In the Blitz game mode, you must protect your team's "Moneyball" from attacking bots controlled by the CPU. They provide to be a very minimal challenge especially when playing Blitz in co-op either online or locally. Crossfire is a much better variation of the gameplay but can still be repetitive after playing the game for an extended period of time. In Crossfire, there are two teams pitted against each other. Players from each team try to destroy the other team's Moneyball while trying to defend their own with the assistance of CPU controlled robots. Though this is fun at first, it gets tiresome quickly. The concept of the game is a good idea if the developers had just thrown in maybe a few more game modes even if they were generic, like Deathmatch.

The Gapshot, one of the many Robots you'll have to contend with.

The variety of classes you can select  a little more playability to the game. There are classes with melee focus to the attacks, snipers, and heavy gunners to just name a few. This brings some variety to accommodate every playing style.

There are a variety of different maps in the game, but once again they are all rather similar, but the environments do look good and it is funny to see a crowd cheering as you blow up the opposing teams players and bots.

Though they lack variety, the maps are well-designed and colorful.

As mentioned before, the visuals of Monday Night Combat are great. The polished cartoon style goes perfectly with the humor in the game and will appeal to fans of Team Fortress 2. The movement of the characters is pretty much flawless and there is no choppiness in the flow and chaos that can be on the screen at any given moment.

The game's Audio is also pretty much flawless as well. Weapon sound effects are well done, as well as explosions and character expressions. The music in the game is very suiting to the came, a stereotypical Hard Rock/Heavy Metal sound. The best part of the audio is the in-game announcer. The guy is damn funny. Making cheeky remarks when people die, and just all around saying funny shit whenever something big happens.

Although MNC brings some solid gameplay, a good concept, and great looking visuals, it doesn't bring anything particularly new to the Third-Person Shooter genre or even the arena-style matches. It feels very similar to many other titles and isn't really anything special. But if you enjoy the style of game, go and download Monday Night Combat on Xbox Live Arcade. It's only 1200 Microsoft Points and don't forget about the deals involving the Summer of Arcade Games this year.

-Jeremy M.