Company
Genre
Adult Swim's record as a publisher includes Robot Unicorn Attack, a browser and later iOS Canabalt-alike featuring a rainbow unicorn running to Erasure's Always. We'd recommend it. It's hard to ignore the cable TV channel's chosen videogame projects and Monsters Ate My Condo, developed by PikPok of Flick Kick Football fame, is another reason why.
This is a joyous and surreal take on destroying towers with a dash of match-three and an abundance of combo possibilities. There are two monsters of different colours on either side of a tower; you must swipe floors into the maws of the monsters, but giving them too much of the wrong colour will incite rage, causing them to destabilise the tower. And if the tower falls, it's game over.
Monsters Ate My Condo's presentation instantly sets it apart: OTT effects and babytalk gags constantly fire up and over the tower as you trigger and match a steady stream of floors. The humour isn't exactly subtle, but this wide-eyed tribute to the tiny niche of Japanese cartoon monsters has a style and humour few games match – with a demented mix of shouty samples and J-pop jangles backing it all up.
What keeps Monsters fun to play are the ever-increasing possibilities and problems you face as your tower grows. Combo-ing the floors in various patterns, feeding them to monsters, and setting up 'metallic' floors for huge bonuses are all important, but rub against one another. Unleashing a monster's power might save your tower from falling over - but is it more important to get rid of that bomb?
Mostly, you find out through trial, error and plenty of dead civilians – when things begin getting out of hand, this collapses into some of the most frantic and funny floor-swiping around. Monsters Ate My Condo is a great marriage of presentation and design, spun with ravishing verve. [8]