Think of it. The brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands! Now I know what it feels like to be God! Okay, so, maybe Monster Lab isn’t quite so fraught with moral dilemmas as your standard mad science story. We can still have a good time without the innocent flower girl being mauled to death, can’t we? That’s the hope, anyway, as I learned from my demo of Monster Lab last week at Eidos’ E3 booth. I was able to witness what man hath wrought in the name of science, and I share my horrifying tale after the jump. Step into my parlor…
Developed by Backbone Entertainment, Monster Lab is a kid-friendly venture into the world of monster creation and battle, for the Wii and DS. My semi-mad game demonstrator told me that the game was intended for the 10 to 12-year-old market, but there were plenty of jokes that clearly indicated this would be a family-appropriate experience; I don’t know how many kids will get it when the game claims to take place “somewhere in the Uncanny Valley.” The gameplay, though, is perfectly accessible for the wee ones — item collection and motion-based mini-games drive the monster-building mechanics, while turn-based combat pits the sins-against-nature against one another.
I was shown some of each segment as my host played through the game’s opening sequences. Combat is a simple turn-based matter of choosing from your monster’s repertoire of moves, each of which may target different body parts. A monster is defeated when it has lost its torso, or when it has lost every limb except its torso (I was told I was not the only visitor to draw the Monty Python Black Knight comparison). Simple enough for any player, though it can also include minor elements of preparation and strategy; the monster parts have relative strengths against each other in a standard rock/paper/scissors system. Mechanical parts are superior to biological parts, which are in turn better than alchemical parts, and so on. Or, if you prefer to work all in one category, you can earn bonuses by combining monster parts from a particular archetype — assembling all of the “werewolf” parts, for example.
I watched as the gruesome fiends on screen bashed, bit, and ventilated one another until one of them had been reduced to rubble, at which point the victor was able to collect spare parts and hurry them back to the lab. From here, I was able to see the monster-building module at work. Players will be able to build their own creatures of the night from assorted parts — the game promises “over 150 million combinations,” so I don’t think anyone’s going to suggest you gotta catch ‘em all. In essence, a monster part, be it arm, leg, head, or torso, is cobbled together from various ingredients located in the field. Each part will have a main ingredient which determines its type, and a sub-ingredient which bolsters it with attributes. A length of pipe, for example, combined with a loose screw, can be cobbled together into a cannon-arm.
Creating the parts themselves is done through a series of mini-games, themed around the scientist you happen to be working under. There are three such madmen/madwomen in the game, favoring different disciplines of mad science: Building monsters through brute mechanical force, genetically splicing biological horrors to life, or summoning gruesome beasts through the dark alchemical arts. As such, you can expect to use the Wiimote (or the DS stylus) to weld pieces into place, to stuff brains into heads, and so on. As you begin to work with more premium ingredients, the games will ramp up in difficulty, and the better your performance, the better the quality of the resulting parts. Slap a collection of parts together, pull the switch, and voila — it’s alive.
Monster Lab will contain an overarching single-player quest, unfolding across the countryside in a standard lock-and-key advancement scenario (You can’t come in here until you’ve retrieved Macguffin A, which can coincidentally be acquired with the skills you just unlocked). However, it will also be possible to take your monsters online and beat the tar out of your friends, in the name of science. Monster Lab’s turn-based combat will work ideally online, even over Nintendo’s oft-maligned wi-fi service.
Monster Lab is slated to launch on the Wii and DS, appropriately, the week of Halloween.
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