There haven’t been nearly enough zombie games on the Xbox 360. The last time we touched a rotting corpse was with Dead Rising, and was easily one of the best zombie games ever made.
So when Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia came out I was intrigued. Like Dead Rising, it allows you to use every object available in the game as a weapon, which led to some of the most creative gameplay yet. Monster Madness is built to be a top-down arcade brawler supporting up to four players, much like Gauntlet. Now I was really intrigued.
The characters are a mix of stereotypical teenagers in a B-movie horror flick. You have the Goth Chick, the blonde Valley Gurl type, the Skater-Boi and the Weird Kid. The character art is actually very good, although the voice acting isn’t. Although any object is available as a weapon, certain characters will do better with some weapons than others.
My expectations started to sink as I started to experience some of the worst controls on any game. The control scheme is just counter-intuitive and overly complicated for a simple top-down shooter. You must manipulate three different controls to fire a weapon in theh right direction, and click the right thumbstick to jump. I can get used to it, but it never feels completely natural. The fun is completely sucked out of wonderfully grusome weapons because they are a chore to use…
Adding to the frustration is the fact that you can’t see anything that’s going on. The top-down idea is a nice novelty, but everything is so small that you can’t see yourself, where the enemies are, which way you’re facing, or where the weapons are. I was playing this game on a 60″ HDTV, so I pity the fool playing this on a standard television. Zombies aren’t really scary when they look like toy soldiers.
These zombies aren’t your typical “Day of the Dead” zombies… more like your “28 Days Later” zombies. They’re fast and they knock down doors, and because of that they’re more annoying than scary… and little.
The level design isn’t all that great either. Each map has a ton of collectible weapons, but they are in parts strewn all over the most obscure parts of the map. This weapon collection scheme transforms this horror shooter into a jump-puzzle, but not in a fun way like Crackdown. Building the parts for some of the more exotic weapons is just too much of a burden, so you’ll end up just sticking to the pick-up weapons. There are also a bunch of invisible barriers on the levels, so you’ll be stopped in your tracks while you’re running away from a train of monsters.
The online multiplayer features aren’t all that great, either. There is no campaign co-op mode, which would have made this game almost worth playing. The multiplayer level design just gets the characters lost.
I really wanted to like Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia. The promises of multiplayer zombie carnage are outweighed by horrible controls and bad level design. Next time, remember Capcom for all your zombie-smashing needs…
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