Monster Force
- September 05, 2002 00:00 AM PST
Universal's latest GBA title is pretty scary. Wait. No, that's not quite the right word. Maybe "spooktacular" is closer.
If you asked a random guy on the street to design a game around some Universal movie monsters drawn to look cute (almost anime-like), he'd very likely come up with Monster Force, an overhead shooter bearing a passing resemblance to Gauntlet. Choosing from three monsters, you're charged with exploring nine sorta-creepy levels, solving "old-school" 16-bit switch puzzles, and shooting cosmic rays at a seemingly endless range of pumpkin-themed enemies.There's really nothing to complain about with the gameplay. The graphics pack a lot of animation into the small screen, and the control works roughly the way you'd expect it to (although collision detection is occasionally an issue). It's the desperate lack of innovation that's the problem; everything here has been done a hundred times before. SNES-style gameplay is fine and all, but on a system that already has a dozen or so SNES ports, Monster Force is likely to get lost in the crowd.
