Super Monday Night Combat

Super Monday Night Combat isn't a shooter, per se. I mean, it has shooting, quite a lot, actually, but it doesn't fit neatly into any single shooter bucket. While it's third person, and you're playing five on five, team versus team, the actual game plays a lot like League of Legends, even to the point of having the same character unlock scheme. While I'm all for a free game, if you really like a character, you might feel like putting down two~five dollars to buy them outright, because otherwise you will be at the mercy of the rotation system.

There's only one mode so far, with a promise of more to come, probably. In any case, this mode is exactly like DOTA, if DOTA was a third person shooter-future-gameshow-thing. Each level has two lanes (colloquially, left lane and right lane) and each supplies a stream of robots that eventually head to the enemy base. You can't outpace the bots, because there are turrets that block your progress, just as there are towers that will kill you in any DOTA-like. You can buy temporary boons at stations across the level, bigger robots at your base, or every five minutes, you can unleash a giant satellite laser that can destroy all enemy robots and cripple the other team's players. That one is really good, and characters usually have to fight for it. Lastly, each base has a single item that must be destroyed. Once you destroy it, you win the game. If the other team destroys your's, you lose. Each match takes about 20 minutes.

Economically, this is either the cheapest, or most expensive games you own. Like League of Legends, the characters rotate in and out of availability. The only characters you get permanently are the ones you've bought. I've been playing for two days now, and I have 2500 combat credits, but I need 9000 if I'm going to buy the hero I have my eye on, Captain Spark. Owning a hero, however, doesn't mean you get to use them all the time, as only one character can be used per team. You can also buy skins for your characters, and you can apply them piecemeal to your character, but only if you own the character, and only if you feel like wasting a lot of money on a cosmetic feature.

Generally speaking, this is a good free game, but the content so far seems a little anemic. Considering the game itself came out ahead of schedule, I guess that can be forgiven, though I would like to see additional modes, characters and maps. Considering how dedicated Uber Entertainment has been to this game so far, it's hard to imagine this game not receiving those things, especially when the payment model requires new content to be doled out on regular intervals, to entice players both new and old into paying for characters and costumes. In the meantime, you enjoy the existing content, which is already more than enough.

(Originally posted on my personal website)