A class based shooter that is light on seriousness and heavy on the fun. This is NOT your father's Team Fortress 2.
However, that is about as far as similarities go. The "support" class might strike you as a combination of the medic and the engineer from TF2, but by combining these two the class now feels like a whole new thing. This is just one example of where Monday Night Combat has improved on the old formula. More major improvements occurred in the objectives and gameplay.
Monday Night combat is most similar to MoBA games like League of Legends or Defense of the Ancients, except played as a much faster paced third person shooter. At the beginning of any match you choose a class, then spend the rest of the game earning money with which you can upgrade your abilities, build towers, or spawn additional robots to go along with the constant waves of robots that spawn normally. Matches can be as much about pushing the enemy lanes by blowing up their robots and protecting your own robots as it is about killing the other team. This will all sound familiar to anyone who has played a MoBA type of game before.
Monday Night Combat combines this MoBA format with a class based shooter to simultaneously raise both of these genres to new heights while creating a new genre. Once a match starts, the action begins immediately and never lets up until the game is over. Most games have a match timer of 15 minutes with a 2 minute overtime, so on most servers you are looking at a 17 minute game tops. This is a big change over MoBA type games that usually last 30-45 minutes, and can go on far longer. MNC also manages to avoid a lot of the frustration of MoBA type of games by being faster paced and more light hearted. Losing in this game does not make you want to break your mouse against the wall or cause your team members to start blaming everyone but themselves for the loss.
The classes are all unique and very fun to play. They are well balanced and all bring something powerful to the team. Certain maps are more suited to certain classes than others, but that is something competitive teams will learn quickly. The game gives enough objectives and points of interest to draw both teams to particular portions of the map to keep every match action packed while not bottle necking everyone in the game into the same little portion of the map.
During any given match, you will have to be aware of:
- How far each lane is pushed.
- How your turrets are doing.
- How the enemy turrets are doing.
- Bullseye, the MNC mascot who tosses out money and goodies for shooting him.
- When is the annihilator back up?
- Can I get a free kill with an ejector?
- Is the enemy sitting on an ejector switch ready to get a free kill on you?
- Your juice meter.
While all of that may sound complex, it really isn't after just a few games.
What you will quickly learn (hopefully) once you start playing crossfire is that money is important and robots are worth money too. It's easy to forget about the robots completely when you are new and play this game like you were playing TF2 and just ignore the robots. In the end, you want to earn money quickly, and killing robots is a good way to get that money. You also gain money by killing other players, with different amounts coming in depending on how you get the kill. The game also rewards you for immediately taunting right after a kill with an extra 50 bucks. This is a significant chunk of change and is definitely worth doing, but it comes with the risk of standing there unable to move or defend yourself for 3-5 seconds. If you kill someone in an out of the way corner, free money. However, if you killed him out in the open, in the middle of a lane, it is a far riskier decision. Little things like this make this game shine.
The ultimate objective, of course, is to get your robots to the enemy's money ball. The money ball has a shield on it that makes it impervious to damage from players by default. Once a few of your bots hop onto the ball and suicide themselves, the shields drop and the ball can now take damage from not only bots, but other players as well. Now your team will try and converge on the ball while the other team must attempt to prevent it from taking damage for roughly 30 seconds. If they succeed, the shields come back online and you must repeat the process. In the meantime, the enemy will be building turrets to stop you and trying to push their own robots back into your base. The action is intense and very satisfying, especially for those who like a little more out of their shooter than "get more kills than the other guys."
In the end, the multitude of objectives and better character classes bring this game a step above it's competition. Add in the fact that this game costs only 15 bucks, and it is a no brainer. If you have even the slightest interest in class based shooters, you would be shooting yourself in the foot by not checking this game out.