At the moment THQ are running a free giveaway of the apocalyptic horror game Metro: 2033. It's based on the novel of the same name by Dmitry Glukhovsky. Set in a future where nuclear war has forced humans to live underground, it tells the tale of survivors in Moscow who live in the underground metro away from the animals and humans on the surface who have mutated into monstrous forms.
To get the game you have to head to THQs Facebook page to see the promotion! Stocks are "limited" so hurry hurry hurry!
However, if you don't mange to get a copy from there, there is also the THQ Humble Bundle, from which you can also get Metro 2033 and 5 other games for $1! The other games aren't really horror, though I suppose Red Faction: Armageddon has aliens, and in Darksiders you play as one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse! That promotion ends in 26 hours.
'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!
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!
Lately, there seems to be a multitude of Facebook zombie games looking to cash in on the current popularity of the undead lurchers. Zombie Farm is one of the newer additions and tries to claim individuality by stating that, whilst they do fight other zombies, the walking corpses do not actually eat brains, as they are vegetarian. Alright, that sounds acceptable because in various mythology, zombies just need to be necrotic creatures, brought back to life by some dark force (or even hypnotised living humans) in order to do the bidding of those controlling them. In that respect, the raising a zombie army to fight your enemies games work very well.
Yeah, don't worry about them hiding in the bushes
or the other zombies they decapitate, they're nice!
"Strawberry Paradise", but you still need brains!
However, if the zombies are indeed vegetarian, why then do you need, in addition to coins and Facebook credits, brains as a form of currency? Who exactly is eating these brains? You? Secret zombie cannibals? Or do they simply steal the brains of other zombies (and vampires and...Harry Potter??) in order to use them to fertilise their crops with? Well, the answer is no. There is really no reason for the brains, other than to enable the creators of Zombie Farm to make you buy items, seeds and zombies with them. When you consider that you can also buy brains with Facebook credits, it them becomes even more obvious that the brains are only there to make money.
Exactly...
All that would be alright, but, as with most Facebook games, you don't get a great deal for the amount of money you have to pay and you can't do very much unless you wish to pay or have a lot of your friends that also play the game. If you buy a PC or console game you at least own it and don't have to pay more just for the privilege of completing the game (excluding online monthly subscription games).
Vegetarian? Yeah right! Zombie Santa wants to eat your braaaaaaaiiiinnnnssss!
However, no one is forcing you to play or pay and the game does have some positive points too. The character designs, for example, are quite interesting, ranging from basic zombies and skeletons to zombie Batman to zombie Santa to vampires to zombie circus performers. This makes it more entertaining to look at, which is good because as with all farm management games, the play can become quite tedious and slow at times, especially if you don't want to buy currency with real money.
It's okay for you to eat brains, as long as they belong to a zombie, of course!
In addition to the characters, the "invading" is quite interesting too. You take your little zombie horde to battle another (random) Zombie Farm player's horde and, once you've gotten rid of all their nice thoughts of flowers and chocolate and made them think of brains, they fight. Regardless of whether you win or lose, you earn money and experience. If you're fortunate enough to have magic spells, you can use them to help your zombies or hinder the enemy side. There is also the possibility of losing all your zombies in one battle, but don't worry, you can always grow new ones!
Who do those hands belong to? Zombie giants?
Overall, Zombie Farm is a cute horror-themed Facebook game to play if you have 5 minutes to spare or are procrastinating. Ultimately though, spending any real money on it seems somewhat futile and I'd recommend something like Plants vs. Zombies instead if you want to buy a cute, spooky, zombie-themed game.
Zombie Mosh is a new game on Facebook, in which you create a zombie character go up levels by moshing with other zombies. When making your little undead darling, you have quite a lot of choice as to what they look like, and you can change their appearence any time you like, which is great considering the game is still only in beta testing. It would be better if you could change the colours of the items too though, because not all of the accessories go together in their default state.
The game takes place within your club and the clubs created by your friends. You can customise your club by buying items from the store with money you get from moshing. Other zombies enter your club and you can interact with them, or you can travel to your friends' clubs and mosh with the zombies there instead. When you mosh in your friends' clubs, you also gain fame, in addition to money and experience. There's also a third option; you can 'grow' your own zombies by planting the humans that wander in from time to time in graves. As you go up levels, you unlock new types of graves, that in turn produce new kinds of zombies.
The one annoying thing about the game, and most games of this kind on Facebook, is that for every action you do, you have to use a certain amount of energy. Once that energy is gone, you have to wait nearly 4 minutes to get 1 energy back, unless you want to pay a silly amount of money for bones, which you can buy special and energy-replenishing items with. So for that reason, it's not really a game you can play for more than about 5 minutes at a time. However, when you go up a level, you recieve bonus energy (how much depends on what level you're at) and you do regain a full energy bar at the beginning of each day.
Whilst it's obviously not the best game ever made, overall, Zombie Mosh is quite entertaining, has a charming look to it and the creators seem to be adding new features regularly. It's worth checking out if you have a Facebook account, some time to kill and a love of zombies!
