Game Review: Monster Mash Saga

It’s Halloween in Australia – let’s not get into the whole US only holiday thing – so why not try out a monster game like Monster Mash Saga from Australian developers Hovel Games.

Gameplay

Monster Mash Saga is a game that falls into the ‘match three’ genre, which sees you matching three or more Ghosts, Zombies, Devils, Mummies or Vampires to clear them. The game is objective based, with each level assigning a goal to reach in a set time period or a set number of moves, which gets harder as you progress through each level.

The matching is done by swiping through a minimum of three monsters, as a bonus you can actually swipe through and match monsters in any direction – horizontally, vertically as well as diagonally – all they have to do is be connected on one of those axis.

In terms of in-game graphics, the game is pretty basic, but it doesn’t need to have any flash 3D graphics. Overall you can tell the difference between a Ghost, a zombie, a devil, a mummy and a vampire and where the slime is and in this game, that’s what’s important.

While the game is simple in concept and works really well in terms of speed and response, the objective based nature of the game will see you lose a life if you fail to reach your goal.

Freemium

While free to download, Monster Mash Saga is ad-supported, but it also includes in-app purchases. The in-app purchases centre around your in-game lives, when you load up the game you are given five lives, when you reach the end of your lives you have some options to gain some more, purchasing a life pack also includes the switch to remove ads :

• 10 Lives + Ad-free – $1.00
• 30 Lives + Ad-free – $2.00
• 100 Lives + Ad-free – $3.00

I love a good match three game – Candy Crush, Cake Bake Blitz, Bejewelled Blitz – I can spend hours on them and I am definitely guilty of using in-app purchases to get more lives or reduce timers so I have no issues with how this has been monetised.

EDIT: After playing the game for a little longer, I realised that your lives actually re-generate, Brilliant!! But still it’d be nice to throw some money the developers way if you enjoy the game.

Game Availability

Hovel Games has released Monster Mash Saga to Android first, intending to release to iOS they hope within the next week. Monster Mash Saga has been developed using Unity to make porting to other platforms a lot easier, but it’s good to see an Android version first for once.

As it’s developed in Unity, there seems to be some odd quirks with the back button, but it’s nothing overly annoying, just something to be aware of and the on-screen navigation buttons do allow you to navigate with ease.

The game is available in Google Play now for devices running Android 2.0.1 and upwards, it’s free to download and 13MB in size.

Conclusion

I really liked Monster Mash Saga, it’s a really cool game which sucks you in and responds really well, with the timed objectives you really have to be quick to get to complete the level and with the limited move levels you have to think about how best to complete the objective. Definitely worth a look if you want something to while away the spooky Halloween hours.