Monster Lab

Screenshots

Notes

This is an interesting one. No knowledge of it before going in.

You play a mad scientist who interacts with the world by constructing monsters and sending them out into the countryside. You control the monsters walking around a node-based world map and get into fights, which are 1v1 turn-based battles with inidividual limb targetting. Collect parts and complete quests, and then use the parts to make new monster parts to make stronger monsters.

The game loves both pre-rendered cutscenes (I think compressed down from the home console versions) and minigames. So many minigames. The controls are a bit weirdly split between buttons and touch screen, can't quite decide what it wants to be.

The big fatal flaw of this game which lead to me rage quitting it, is that every time you make a new monster part, a key element of the gameplay loop, you have to do a 1 minute long unskippable minigame. You do the same minigame each time for each element/monster part, and they were easy and boring the first time I did them. Really can't imagine playing a whole game of them. Shame as this does have some interesting ideas and could have been good with some relatively small tweaks.