Recent reviews by Willex

A bug-riddled mess that is all style and no substance. I was lured in by that sweet, nostalgic art style reminiscent of the early Pokémon games, but ended up very disappointed in what it had to offer.

Starting off with the few positives, the art style is cute, there're plenty of nice monster designs and the soundtrack is decent enough. Moving on to the negatives, I'll start off with ignoring the many, many bugs encountered in my 10 hours of play time.

There are just 5 types that monsters can be, and there are no dual types. As the advantage makes a perfect circle, it means each monster only has one weakness. This simplicity could potentially be fine if there were other mechanics to make up for it, but there simple aren't any interesting mechanics to work with. Mostly you'll just either boost your stats or decrease your opponent's. This leads to fights consisting in very little strategising, as hitting others or swapping out monsters to not be matched against you're weakness is the extent of complexity this game has to offer. This game could really have used some more status effects and other tricks available to spice things up, the few status effect that are are just some extra damage.

The story and characters feels completely uninspired and uninteresting, and it is often unclear of where to go next. At first I welcomed this openness of the world, but later I was locked out of progressing without any indication of where I needed to go. After this had repeated a few too many times I simply gave up on the game altogether.

And finally, the many bugs. After realising they were so many I couldn't remember them on top of my head I started making a list of them.
- Monster disappearing: One of my monsters straight up just disappeared permanently from my party, nowhere to be found, seemingly out of nowhere.
- Attacks replaced: The entire moveset of one of my monsters got permanently replaced to be the exact same of another monster's.
- Menu freeze: The menu froze when trying to close it after using some items, which resulted in losing progress as I had to restart the game and go from my last save.
- Monsters dying get to act again: Many times, after my one of my monster's health had dropped to 0, I still got to chose an action again for seemingly no reason at all.
- Attacks swapping order: You can set the order of attacks in the moveset of each monster, but every time they get a new move it is reset to a default order.
- Screen for learning new attack appears twice: the majority of the times a new attack is gained the screen shows first when the monster levelled up, then once again after a random interaction, such as entering a building, talking to a character or opening a menu. This also resets the order of the attacks again.
- Attacks appearing twice: Multiple times the same monster learnt the same attack twice and had it show up twice in its moveset.
- Monsters in overworld ignoring height: Walking on bridges above a monster still causes you to engage in battle with it, despite you seemingly being way above it.
- Monsters spawning outside map: When in caves you can consistently see monsters spawning outside the map of the cave, on top of the pitch black background.
- Walk through characters: Some characters I could walk straight through despite not being able to do so with any other. None of them were important though, just random NPCs in their houses.
- Rendering order messy: Sometimes characters and items appear on top of things they should be below.
- Wrong music playing when entering new area: Song of the soundtrack swaps when going into a new area, some times the same track you were already listening to starts over again instead of the track switching.
- Music volume lowering in battle: Once one of your monsters get knocked out and a menu for picking the next one appears, the volume of the battle theme decreases a bit. Some times it didn't go back up once out of the menu, in battles where multiple of your monsters were defeated it decreased until you could barely hear it.

For a full release the amount of bugs is unforgivable. On top of that, Monster Crown just isn't a very good game regardless.

Straight forward action game that doesn't overstay its welcome. It got fights that make for a decent challenge, with a pretty good variation of enemies to fight. The exploration of the four zones is very enjoyable, as they are all both visually distinct as well as having a different feel to them in how they're mapped out and enemies that inhabit them. The enemies various attack pattern also work as great foreshadowing to the bosses of the areas in most cases.

Controls feel good, movement is fast and responsive. The mechanic to recharge your ranged weapons by landing melee attacks is pretty great as it forces you to get up close. There's also a decent variety of guns to equip which can be utilised for different approaches.

I adore the art style, there's so much personality to the environments and characters. Music is pretty great too, in combination with the pixel art it makes for a very atmospheric experience.

Just one more run