Monday Night Combat Review

If you are familiar with Team Fortress 2, then you will be absolutely comfortable playing Monday Night Combat (MNC). The game takes a lot of visual cues and character class types from the popular game, however its hard to imagine that this game is actually running on Unreal Engine 3 because of its visual presentation. Truth be told, if you didn’t know any better it would seem like a futuristic extension of Team Fortress 2. Settings aside these first few similarities, the game does begin to show its differences, and honestly it is quite addicting.

Gameplay mechanics require some explanation, the battle takes place on a huge platform of sorts, with multiple pathways that lead to the other teams’ side. Each team has to defend a globe on their respective side containing money. There are various pre-set locations on each side where high jump locations are enabled, and defensive structures can be built, these structures are to protect the globe and the pathways that the enemy can take. Each side also gets a helpful set of robots of various different types to assist in the battle. These mostly serve to keep other players distracted, or push the line until one side reaches their goal. This alone sets this game apart in a league of its own compared to other shooters.

As the player, when getting kills, whether robots or players, earns you money that can be spent a variety of ways. One of these is to purchase and upgrade defensive structures, and to enable the aforementioned high jump points. You can also spend money to spawn extra robots to push the other side back, which is a critical part of the tactics in this title. Another way money can be spent is to upgrade your abilities, in-game on the fly, for example for the Assault class, you can increase the blast radius and damage of your proximity bombs, damage and speed, increase the length of time you can keep your thrusters on, etc. What should be noted is that these upgrades do not carry over from match to match, they are reset and must be repurchased every round. However what you can purchase and retain, are banners, clan tags and wearable extras to show off in-game after earning achievements for a selected act, think along the lines of Call of Duty. Each character also has finisher moves, which are different than melee attacks and are often one hit kills, these though need to be performed in extremely close proximity of the target and include the risk of getting killed. The satisfaction from performing one though, outweighs the risk of dying.

There are 6 main character classes available in MNC, namely Assault, Support, Tank, Assassin, Sniper and Gunner. Assault is your standard character, well rounded with a fair set of abilities. The Support class heals, and has better special abilities like setting up personal turrets and such. The Tank class sacrifices offensive power for defensive ability, useful when paired with an Assault and or Gunner. The Assassin can cloak, has very little defensive ability but is lethal at close range and a fair set of abilities. The Sniper is self explanatory and the final is the Gunner class which is a total offensive class, much like the Gunner from TF2 and should almost always be paired with a Support class. You cannot help but notice the similarities between these characters and their TF2 counter-parts, and as a matter of fact Valve went ahead and allowed minor TF2 flair additions to the game. Such as the eye patch of the Demolition, and Healing pack of the Medic, among the few tiny visual additions which earn you banners should you use them.

As mentioned earlier the game is built using Unreal Engine 3, yet the visual flair of the characters is so similar to TF2 that you wonder if there really is that much of a difference between the Source Engine and Unreal Engine 3. Not much can be said other than this game looks great, it may be not be the next Crysis, nor does it have to be. It maintains a simplistic look yet manages to look futuristic and appealing, this on its own helps the environment seem consistent and smooth.

Much of the game sound design is organized around the concept of a main event, as the name suggests, Monday Night Combat. There is an announcer that, almost annoying tells you what to do and how the game is going on, and is more than happy to rally the crowd when you die, or kill someone with a good finisher move. Crowds cheer as one side begins to overwhelm the other, bots and gunfire rage about, each weapon and character has their distinct intro sound and voices, in the end all these elements come together to create the world being experienced.

There has been a lot of effort put into differentiating this title from other games of this nature, and should it get proper exposure, and perhaps a console port if possible, this game can garner a massive following. Perhaps not to the tune of Call of Duty, but the makings of a great franchise are there to be successful. Monday Night Combat is available exclusively on Steam for the PC, with a plethora of achievements and updates constantly being made, all for $14.99US.