Grab The Games: Monsters & Munitions

While Monsters and Munitions is still in early access it is already looking to be a very interesting mix of Angry Birds, card game with some strategy sprinkled on top. Also, which is very promising, it is stable and more or less bug-free. The main portion of the game are levels, where you fire your tank trying to hit monsters hidden in castles, dungeons, caves etc. The firing itself will be very familiar to anyone who has played Angry Birds, you decide on the trajectory and strength of your shot and then fire. The game does a good job at showing how your projectile will fly, but when it becomes interesting is the choice of ammunition.

That's not a perfect shot

On each map you can fire up to 3 shots and if you manage to win in less, they will carry over to the next map, so the game encourages perfectionism. Now, the monsters are usually well hidden, and to get to them you can't just aim true, usually you need to cause some chain reaction with one thing exploding, igniting something else, exploding again, collapsing a building, at which point the monster finally dies. There is actually a surprising amount of thinking here, the shooting itself is the outcome of long deliberation and studying the map.

Choosing the right shot is 45% of success here

And here we come to the ammunition, in order for your plan to be successful, you have to choose carefully between drilling, exploding and bouncing projectiles. Trouble, or fun, is that those missiles are cards selected from your deck. The starting cards in your deck are a pretty random affair (although you do have some choice there), later on you get new cards as rewards, but that's still pretty random. Usually the appeal of card games comes from the drive towards having and completing a better set, which you can compare when it faces your opponents set. Monsters and Munitions, at the moment at least, seems to be purely single player, so I am not sure how big the card appeal will be here. Maybe I'm just not the person to get hooked at collecting. There is one more aspect to the game, that seems not very fleshed out now the levels you fight are a part of meta game, a map with hexes where you move and fight through different levels.

At first knowing where to go on this map is not obvious.

The idea in itself is very good, but it is hard to know where to go, you don't see much difference between choosing one hex over the other at the beginning, so at the moment it seems to be something of a placeholder rather than a fun part of the game. I am not sure where the devs will take this game, I can see a lot of potential here, figuring out the ways to beat each levels is very fun already... But at the same time it's a little hard to be sure who is the intended target of this game for example the levels are very difficult and with limited numbers of shots failing happens often. And that's great, I applaud this kind of hardcore, unforgiving approach... but failing a level doesn't see to have any serious consequences, you can just try again. It is as if the game is trying to be hardcore and casual at the same time. Still, this is early access, and trying different approaches is perfectly fine at this stage. If the developers take it in the right direction we may have something very interesting here, I could see this game becoming a real classic one day.

Mikolaj W.