We played a lot on a larger TV, and in this context its issues are more glaring. As you’d expect, it’s the sort of look that is designed for smaller screens. The basic menus and color palettes feel more of the earlier era, but the environments have more detail and attention. ![]() The aesthetics of Monster Crown split the difference between the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance eras. On the other hand, losing your items when you faint? It’s a change that leads to less of a hoarder mentality, even with the unfriendliness of the world. Battles are designed to have a built-in momentum, and it feels like, for once, the AI has a better handle on how to fight than you do. There’s a whole button dedicated to making a monster sit so you can grab a snack and feed it. Its custom button prompts are disorienting for a while. ![]() The result is a game you really need to wrangle. There are only five types, so you can memorize them! But the types, based around personality rather than element, don’t have the obvious “fire burns grass” sort of connections and the colors and icons don’t exactly do a lot to make things easier. Sometimes, it goes a step or two beyond what was needed, like its typing system that isn’t particularly intuitive. It is, at times, a breath of fresh air after the oppressive hand-holding of Pokémon. Know how to get new monsters? Know how to access the menus? Cool, see ya! In an interview with Siliconera, lead developer Jason Walsh described Monster Crown as “a rough-and-tumble world where you have to fend for yourself.” This tracks with our time with the game, as you’re given some vague early tutorials and then largely set loose. Monster Crown is, instead, a game for people who enjoy beating Pokémon in 20 hours or so, setting it down and finding another game. That’s a game for the sort of people who love dumping hundreds of hours into Pokémon’s status quo: IV optimization, shiny hunting, cute animations and colorful, friendly locales. It’s perhaps appropriate that it’s entering the market so close to a game on the other end, Crema’s Temtem. ![]() These sorts of things have been a trend in modern games for some time, but they haven’t really hit a monster-collecting genre dominated by the cute and painless. It wants you to feel like you’ve earned what you have. Monster Crown is not a game for beginners.Ī long-anticipated release from developer Studio Aurum and publisher Soedesco, Monster Crown wants to feel tough.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |