Games: Monstermind

Monstermind on Facebook

'Monstermind' is a Facebook game, in which you try to build a prosperous town while making monsters to attack your friends enemies with, set in 1940's-1960's sci-fi horror movies. Even the music is a gloriously cheesy monster movie score!

MONSTERMIND on Facebook

Your town, which will automatically be called '*your first name*-wood', is pretty empty when you first acquire it, but it doesn't take long to change that! Build houses for population, commerce buildings for money, defence to protect your lovely monsters...or people, and decorations to slow down enemy attacks. You can also change the name of your town, by clicking on it and typing/deleting. Naturally, I chose to call my town 'Horrorwood', since I'm just that original. Heh.

Now, whilst creating a thriving little town, in which you balance the population number with the amount of commerce, is all very fascinating, the best part of 'Monstermind' comes when you get to unleash your mutated creations onto another player's town! Kyahahahaha! You unlock new creature types with each level, from giant apes to giant women, and destructive robots to zombies! The first time you use them, a little information box Every kind of monster has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it's a good idea to experiment to see which ones work well together in the town you're attacking.

For example, zombies might be fashionable horrors right now and you might want to use them, but they cannot take on tanks! Just leave those to the bigger, tougher monsters and let the zombies run shamble in when there's not much defence left. This is important, because you get to keep all of the surviving monsters after each attack. The more creatures you have left, the more you will have to use next time. The key to all the attacks is to take out the Town Hall as quickly as possible, because nothing can function without it!

Initially, you can only attack / be attacked by your friends' towns and Doomsday, but if you hire Eva for 100, you can spread terror and destruction to random player cities too. This makes it much easier to gain experience, collection items, and extra money. Of course, they can then send their monster minions to demolish your town too, so you need to defend it!

There are also quests that appear on the left-hand side of the screen from time to time. When you click them, an old fashioned TV appears and plays a little animated movie telling you what you need to do. Not all of the movies are finished (it simply says "coming soon"), and sometimes it can be difficult to tell what you should be doing, but there is a text summary at the end of the films. Also, the animations remind me of the cartoon 'Dexter's Lab', but I'm not entirely convinced that wasn't intentional.

For all its fun, 'Monstermind' is still a Facebook game, and they can be pretty tedious, and highly frustrating when you get to the point where you suddenly need to spend a stupid amount of real money in order to progress. That's usually the point when I stop playing. However, 'Monstermind' is different, because even though you can buy addons, you don't need to. You can trade in the collections to acquire specific things, such as monsters, buildings, and decorations for free, including some which can only be bought with real money ordinarily. Hopefully they'll keep this feature, as it's something that makes 'Monstermind' much more enjoyable than other games of a similar type.

Overall, 'Monstermind' is an amusing and enjoyable sci-fi horror-themed game that provides procrastinators everywhere with more distractions than usual. It has a cute charm for those who just want to cuddle the monsters, mixed with just enough destruction to keep budding world dominators entertained for hours!