My exploration of the Mobile and Handheld BAFTA nominees continues with the inexplicable Super Monsters Ate My Condo by PikPok.
Super Monsters Ate My Condo is lunacy digitised, but it’s also a lot of fun. Try not to look for sense in the technicolour crazy, just let the frantic points grab gameplay titillate your dopamine receptors with it’s nonsense Japanese game show acid-trip vibe.
For reasons I dare not ask, a steady stream of condos drop out of the sky, forming a Jenga-like stack of precariously-balanced multicoloured residences. A stable a bizarre giant monsters – each with an odd name and a hilarious back story – take turns menacing the condo stack and they grow increasingly hungry as time passes. With their hunger comes irritability which will lead to an epic tantrum, destabilising the condo tower, but they can be placated by feeding them a condo of their corresponding colour with a flick of the finger. Feeding them one of the wrong colour has the opposite effect.
Removing condos in this manner allows three or more adjacent condos of the same colour to combine into more lucrative constructions, which can be fed to the monsters to activate special abilities which will affect the nonsense with an additional level of nonsense.
A clock counts down, giving you only two minutes to score as many points as possible, but a variety of boosts can be earned to greatly enhance your point-scoring ability.
The result is a hectic explosion of colour and sound which becomes addictive at some base level in your brain, leaving you craving another go without ever really understanding why.
It really feels like spending two minutes inside the mind of a hyperactive child having a sugar rush. I can’t play it for long without developing a nervous twitch, but my heavily pregnant wife is hooked and scores it 7 out of 10.
I’m just concerned Super Monsters Ate My Condo might induce labour.
Super Monsters Ate My Condo is available for free download from the iTunes Store and the Android Market with subsequent in-app purchases.
Published: Mar 11, 2013 09:26 am