DigitalBattle.com

When you take four high school kids and put them in an absolutely preposterous situation—like, say, the rising of the dead to attack the living along with a whole horde of other monstrosities—you know you’re in for one of a few things.  You’re in for action, humor, bloodshed, and quite possibly a video game.  In this case, Monster Madness: Battle For Suburbia on the Xbox 360 (called Monster Madness: Grave Danger on the Playstation 3), will offer up all four.

As far as the plot goes, it’s pretty much what it says on the box.  Monsters of all types and descriptions have descended on a small city for no clear reason, and the only people in any position to do anything about it are four high school kids who were all at the nerdy kid’s house at the time.  There’s a nerd, as I said, but also a goth chick, a cheerleader and a skater punk, assuring you that literally every high school archetype is well in hand.  They’ll be aided and abetted by a fellow named Larry Tools, a guy who travels around in an RV providing souped-up weapons to the kids that he makes from literally random piles of junk so that they can go out and possibly get killed by the legions of monsters roaming town.

On the one hand, this idea is actually fairly awesome.  There are some parts to this game that are just spectacularly fun, including this one really sweet sequence where you drive a swan boat (a fiberglass boat shaped like a swan that you pedal around the water, in case you’re not familiar) that’s been outfitted with dual missile launchers controlled by your Xbox controller triggers.  Left one fires the left tube and right fires the right.  See, I could’ve played a whole game like this and probably would’ve paid the ten bucks to download it from Xbox Live.  I liked timing those missiles’ arc carefully to watch them slam gracefully into pirate ships crewed by the living dead.

On the other hand, that fantastic segment only lasts as long as it takes to kill eight ships.  Then you’re done.  You will NEVER see that swan boat again.  And this made me extremely sad.  Because what I had to do to get to that boat was almost identical to what I would have to do when I got out of that boat, and would have to do for several stages to come.  Specifically, walk around and blast things.  Over and over and over and over again.  Oh, sure, they’d try and recapture that fun with a dune buggy that was almost uncontrollable for the weird camera angles, and a fairly interesting bit with a giant battlemech, but nothing was as fun as that brief swan boat ride.

Oh, sure, there are some great jokes in here, and the storyline isn’t that terrible–if you were any kind of geek back in high school you probably had daydreams that looked a LOT like this.  But there’s no denying that there’s so much wrong with this game that the good doesn’t really shine through.

And when the most fun you have in a game is a tiny little stretch that’s never repeated, well, that doesn’t bode well for the entirety of the game.  Everything about this, except for that one little strip, is mediocre and overdone.  I can’t really recommend it as anything more than a rental, just to see if you enjoy it.  Watch out for those swan boats…they’re a great time.  Everything else is a sad little wreck.