Monstermind is a hybrid Facebook game that revolves around city building and tower defense. The game allows players to try their best to resurrect the town and repel the groups of fierce monsters sent by friends. While most of the city-building MMOs focus on providing players enormous choices to build as large and beautiful cities as possible, Monstermind acts the other way around, exposing players’ homes to ruthless wreckage inflicted by monsters. As the game’s loaded, a brief background story is narrated via slices of flashes that monsters wreck havoc to a small town which must be placed under care of a capable administrator, who can rebuild and defend it from further danger. Upon entry, a twelve-step tutorial starts with greetings from the Mayor of the little city, and continues to guide you through various basic activities, ranging from repairing damaged houses to sending in monsters to friends’ cities, from earning XP, Monsterbuck and collectables to spending coins to buy items for emergency or decoration. The tutorial covers the entire gameplay, which can be simply summarized in four words, that is, build, defend, repair and attack. To build up a large and functioning city is an important goal in the game. With a collection of forty-or-so types of buildings and decorations, it is quite possible to forge a unique city that works well in all facets, including enough population, profitable commerce as well as beautified city image, etc. Yet all these are not enough, for the city built with great efforts may be laid waste quickly without powerful defense. Nearly a dozen of weapons and defenses are on offer, but most of them are level-locked, accessible only after leveling up to the pre-set requirement. In the initial, you can only buy sandbag walls and machine gun nests to defend the city; thusly, it’s almost unavoidable that your city is ravaged by attacking monsters like giant apes, zombies, monster birds, and the likewise, which can be sent by friends or NPCs. If attacked, which is certain to happen, you have no other choices but to repair whatever is destroyed (almost everything is destructible), be it a decorative cherry tree or a chemistry lab, at the cost of coins and laborers. Besides the passive defense and repair, you can attack friends’ cities by sending monsters there; in fact, you must do so, for it’s the only way, alternative to defending, to earn XPs and collectables to level up. So another requirement comes forth: you must have at least one friend to play with. Otherwise, you can only attack NPC’s cities, which are ten to one designed with so effective a defense system that your dispatched monsters are already taken down even before they have chance to set foot in the closure. Under such circumstance, the Monsterbucks and XP from the remains of the attacked city will certainly be limited, which in turn drags down the procession. The concept of blending construction and destruction in Monstermind wins it many applauds in that it does take a step forward when compared with the sole city-building gameplay which will turn to a bore after a period of time. Yet it still leaves much to be desired, for the whole repair is in the essence no different from adding a few more clicks, which eventually becomes repetitive and dull, too. To pile on this defect, it is a little bit annoying in its design of coin-collection, which also requires highly-frequent clicks on buildings in Commerce category. To sum up, Monstermind takes a less traveled path to develop city-building simulation. As a game of one-of-a-kind, it is passable with its clean graphics, good music and creative storyline. It’s not great but good enough to idle away a few minutes.
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