MNC-Debut

[Wednesday, August 11th 8:00 PM- 12:00 AM]


    Last night was the release of Monday Night Combat on XBL Arcade. This game is a team-based game that includes different classes, similar to TF2. The best explination is the game is a mixture of TF2 and League of Legends (LoL) or Defence of the Ancients (DOTA), two popular defense games where players must work together to overthrow the opposing side’s tower with the constant support of low level bots. This game offers the right amount of “different” to this experiment, especially since the only two games originally listed for review were two FPS, military-based multiplayers. This is quite a different scene for the console, and I expect this to draw an interesting crowd.

    The playable characters are thus: Assault, Tank, Gunner, Assassin, Sniper and Support. There is one playable female character (Assassin), one African American man (Assault) and the rest are Caucasian males. Subjectively speaking, females always complain of a lacking of female support in games, or if female characters are present, they’re crappy characters (as suggested by the survey). For MNC, the female character is potentially the coolest looking character, which actually requires a fair amount of skill to master completely. She is clothed in black from head to two, not showing her face, the only gender indication being the curves of her body. This is countered by one of the non-playable characters (NPC) called the “Pit Girl”, who is scantly clad and servers mostly as eye candy to support the players.
   
    Last night, barely anyone spoke over the headset to criticize other players. There is a fairly low learning curve for this game, with very easy controls (for those who are accustomed to FPS, 3D controls), with balanced players that make it easy to jump between classes. This is the first console experience where someone WASN’T cursed out along the time span of my playing experience. This game is only accessible through Xbox Live Arcade, so there is a possibility that this limits some of the population of a normal online community. However, this also makes this game Xbox-Exclusive, forcing it to only represent the XBL community. 


There appears to be a good representation of female characters within the game itself, and while the game has violent tendencies (shooting, stabbing, the likes), the game is quirky and highly enjoyable. There is no glorification of bloodshed that accentuates the violence to make the game grotesque. Simply by gamer-tag, there were no obvious "female" presence within the lobbies, however. 


This game, like Halo 3, creates a party which allows you to play multiple games with the game group of people. Console games are unable to have the server option that is available to PC gamers, however they do have the option to remain in the same party and share a playing experience.