Demo Review 28: Monsteca Corral

Monsteca Corral gives us a world populated by monsters; your goal is to bring some vaguely humanoid creatures from their starting point to a location far, far away. First you get to learn how the camera works, and then you can try the basic controls: leading your monsters to a point, and then recruiting more monsters located around that world. You also learn how to make your Stompies (yes, that's their name) jump. It's kind of fun because they can jump in about any direction. After your herd is collected, you must pick bubbles of gas around. They randomly pop up around the level, but breaking the robots' buildings will let out a lot of gas bubbles.

When the bubbles have been collected, a giant worm called the Astromaggot will appear. Feed all the bubbles to it! You'll certainly need to get more gas bubbles and feed it numerous times. When the Astromaggot is filled with gas, it will fly away; make sure your Stompies stick to it!

Yeah, it's kind of a weird game, huh? Anyway, you get a second tutorial level in which the robots are patrolling the zone. This level is very difficult, and I suspect there's a programming error in it because I was unable to gather most of the tribe. Well, after that failure of a tutorial level (which I could skip, thankfully), I got into a real level, with over ten Stompies to pick up around the place. Also, you don't need to pick them all up to start collecting gas bubbles, and again, you don't need them all to break robot headquarters or feed the Astromaggot.

The controls are a tad messy (the jumping mechanic is pretty bad), and the camera isn't too simple to use. But if you can overcome these small problems, you get a game with just enough material to be interesting for a while. How long? I can't tell. Probably not a long while, because it seems like the same goals are repeated on every level, with no variants brought in after a while. It was fun while the demo lasted, but I doubt I could play more and not get bored very quickly. I'm not going to buy the full version. Still, I suggest you try the demo.