E3 06: Monster Madness Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--What do you do when your neighborhood is overrun by a vast horde of uncaring, unfeeling undead, intent on snacking on all your friends and family as if they were juicy, human snack cakes? Well, if you're anything like the plucky protagonists of Southpeak Interactive's upcoming Xbox game Monster Madness, you grab the nearest weapon you can and start bashing some monster brains. We got a chance to do some monster-bashing of our own while checking out this top-down shooter for the PC and Xbox 360.

Monster Madness represents one of the first forays into game development from Artificial Studios, a development house formerly known for their middleware products such as the Reality engine (which was subsequently picked up by the folks at Epic and worked into the Unreal Engine 3). The game is a fast-paced, shoot-'em-up characterized by constant action and a dark sense of humor that puts a smirk and wink on some of the bloody battles on the screen.

The game's single-player game will focus on cooperative play for up to four players on the same Xbox 360. Instead of using a split screen for each individual player, the players will more or less be grouped together onscreen, with the camera interactively dipping in and out to keep everyone onscreen, even if they spread out a bit. A similar system is at play during the game's multiplayer matches, which will support up to 16 players in competitive match types such as capture the flag and straight up deathmatches. Here, the camera has a tougher job in trying to keep everyone onscreen at the same time, dipping in when the players are bunched close together and zooming out when the action spreads across the map. For the most part, it seems to work okay, although we will say we enjoyed the closer views much more, as it gave us a chance to check out the character models in greater detail. There were some hitches, however, in one cemetery multiplayer map we tried--the camera couldn't zoom out far enough to encompass everyone. With more development time to go, there's still plenty of time to make sure the cameras are working more effectively.

The demo of Monster Madness featured four maps--three of which were multiplayer and one co-op map--which gave us a peek at how the game's story mode will progress. Our favorite multiplayer map of the bunch was the cemetery level--camera issues aside, its relatively tight confines made for some intense competition between the four players taking part. Because the level was relatively small, melee weapons were ideal--we saw everything from samurai swords to axes to a plunger used to deal some up-close-and-personal pain to our foes. Some characters will favor one type of melee weapon over another; for example, the goth chick, Carrie, favors swords. If your character is using their favored melee weapon, they can earn superpowered attacks with that weapon. At longer distances, there will be plenty of long-range weapons--machine guns, bazookas, and even strange energy weapons.

Character control didn't take very long to get used to. You move the characters with the right analog stick and "look" with the left stick, letting you easily move your character in one direction and shoot in another. Firing weapons was done with the right trigger, while switching between melee and guns was pulled off with the Y button. While each character can only carry one melee weapon, they can hold as many guns as they can carry--and you cycle through all your weapons with the Y button as well.

The look of Monster Madness is an appealing cross between comic-book-character design crossed with B-movie horror-flick aesthetics. The characters themselves all fall into the well-established high school archetypes--the jock, the geek, the surfer dude, the cheerleader. As they battle in the environments, comic book text balloons periodically pop up, describing the latest kill or whichever weapon was just picked up. While the build of the game we played didn't have any in-game audio beyond some lively music, producers told us they plan on having plenty of character dialogue during the battles--we suspect consistent trash-talking will be the dialogue's major theme.

The last level we tried out in the demo featured the co-op that will be the centerpiece of the game's single-player experience. The basic idea of the story mode is quite simple: A group of four high school students gather for a weekend party, with no parents around. Monsters overrun the quiet suburban setting, and it's up to the pack of teens to figure out what's happened to their beloved town. After choosing our characters, we watched as our peaceful suburban neighborhood was attacked by a group of bloodthirsty zombies. Playing with another game producer, we made quick work of the bloodsuckers, carving a path of bloody zombie flesh with our katanas and automatic weapons. The action in co-op mode seems relatively linear; you can only progress after destroying all of the enemies in a single area, and then it's on to the next group of baddies. As we progressed among and between the streets and houses that composed the level, we took out multiple undead creeps, a couple of big boss zombies, and checked out the respawn system--you can revive a fallen partner by reaching certain points on the map. One of the tougher enemies we faced were a bunch of squat little monsters that required us to aim down and fire our weapons, which was achieved by pressing the left bumper on the Xbox 360 controller. Thanks to the odd camera angle, it wasn't as intuitive as it probably could have been, and those little buggers were pretty tough to take down.

In all, Monster Madness is looking to be well on its way to becoming an attractive alternative to the traditional first-person shooters. Its combinations of dark humor and nonstop action, as well as old-school, top-down mechanics coupled with modern day technology, means we'll be keeping our eyes on this one in the coming months to see how it progresses.