Reviewed by Melissa Yamamoto
My decision to play Monsters vs. Aliens came from watching the movie. For those who still haven’t watched it, it’s going to be a little bit hard to understand a few things, since it follows the movie’s storyline and doesn’t offer any important explanations. For example, how Susan Murphy, a human girl, turned into a giant and how she ended up joining the group of nice monsters to save the city.
While the movie was good, the game experience wasn’t that great.
I finished the game in two hours, and this is because I stopped and kept going back and forth. While the game is composed of only 17 short and easy levels, it didn’t hold my attention.
The group of monsters designated to save the city consist of: Ginormica, a girl who was hit by a meteorite on her wedding day; Dr. Cockroach Ph.D., who was once a genius scientist and had an accident during one of his experiments; B.O.B, a blue one-eye gelatinous mass created by scientists; Missing Link, a mixture of hybrid fish and ape; and Insectosaurus, a monster even bigger than Ginormica.
The main objective is to stop Gallaxhar, a greedy alien who is after the quantonium, a substance that made Susan a giant when she was hit by the meteor. To do so, he sends a huge robot to the planet to find and extract the quantonium from her, and since he’s the villain, destroying the city where the robot landed is also in his plans.
The U.S president, with Gal. Monger (responsible for all monsters captured on the planet), decides to use the group to stop the robot and Gallaxhar.
This game is about team work. You get to play as all the monsters, and each one of them has a special ability, such as spit, take shapes of different objects for disguise or, crawling walls, but at some point, even though the scenery changes, what could’ve been an interesting idea by giving each character its own part in the game, turns into a boring and endless experience, the main reason I turned on/off the DS so many times. For example, when you play as Dr. Cockroach, the brain of the group, you’ll solve puzzles like trying to hit all green orbs with the one laser shot by maneuvering mirrors, but his levels are repetitive, same for the other monsters.
You’ll also be required to use the stylus and blow on the microphone, which was somewhat fun but not really innovative.
An interesting fact is that the voices of the characters are done by the voice actors from the movie itself. Reese Witherspoon and Hugh Laurie, among other actors, lent their voices to the game. Although a large amount of dialogue was used to try to explain the story, adding more scenes from the movie and cutting some of the dialogues would have been better. Or less annoying, to say the least.
The music and sound effects were specially composed for the game but it didn’t give it the boost it needed. Graphically speaking, the animation was average, a bit like dragging a poor version of the movie to the DS.
We’ve seen bad movies based on good books, and unfortunately, bad games based on good movies. Kids might perhaps enjoy this version of Monsters vs. Aliens, but I prefer the movie and wouldn’t recommend the game.