Monster Madness
For Xbox 360

Monster Madness sounds good in theory. It’s a multiplayer cooperative game much in the style of Gauntlet, only with a zombie theme. You play one of four caricatured teens who suddenly are beset by hordes of zombies. Each of you has a special object you can wield better than any other object, but most objects can be used as weapons. It’s almost as if they liked the idea of Dead Rising, and wanted to add humor and multiplayer to that horror genre game. The game also offers Xbox live play, so you can beat on zombies with more of your friends and add to the mayhem. Sounds good, right? The problem is the mayhem is really no fun, mainly because the controls and the camera are just awful. It’s hard to figure out in the cluttered screen where your weapon is with the camera jerking around to follow your mates. Once you find your weapon, it is difficult to get it to land where you want it to. Add to the confusion four of you running around looking for your weapons and the screen gets quite crowded. It made me angry to play this game, as cooperative hack and slash games tend to be fun. I just wanted to go out and rent the generic Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows game because at least that would have good control even if the game play was uninspired. What’s the most disappointing about this game is that it had so much potential. The characters are cute in that B movie sort of way, and the visuals, though cluttered reminded me a bit of the Day of the Tentacle in their goofiness. The controls were just so miserable though, I could not enjoy myself despite the promise of this title.

2 out of 5