Well, the Liberated Pixel Cup has ended. There are 48 games competing, and I’m taking my time reviewing them all.
A fair disclaimer: I’m also competing in the Cup. I’ll try to be unbiased though, judge for yourself and give the games a try!
Monk Story [Play me!] [Download me!] [Controls & Info]
This is an HTML5 game. Sadly. It shows HTML5′s biggest flaw: It can’t handle action games properly. This is not the fault of Monk Story, or CraftyJS. I’m not even sure I’d blame Firefox for having to compensate with Javascript’s nature… but I’m sidestepping the actual game review.
The game starts out with a Monk(Or is it a Wizard?). There is not a single hint on what to do or how to play. For a game titled “Monk Story” there really wasn’t a hint of a story. The gameplay however, was pretty fantastic. You move around with WASD Keys, and wherever you click, it shoots a little fire beam. The game’s pacing starts out slow and begins ramping up. Suddenly, you’re overwhelmed by a massive amount of enemies and bullets just flying all over the screen. Enemies drop different coin colors when they die, but what to do with this coins is still a mystery to me.
The center of the screen has your base, as well as 3 stone characters. After pinging the developer, I was told that I could drag these characters into the force fields around the area to spawn helpers. I could also place these on the Trophy Cups to spawn different kinds of towers, but what sort of currency each type used was also a mystery. I kept dragging them onto the force fields and hoping they would spawn.You can also use special spells hitting the 1 or 2 button on the keyboard which does a widespread special attack.
After setting up a base so powerful that no immediate threat was in sight, I decided to explore the area. I overheard the developer say that the maps are randomly generated, which is pretty awesome, as there’s even a minimap on the top right corner that shows the general area.
I saw 2 giant bosses around the map, a giant skull / death as well as oversized training dummies. After several tries, I gave up on trying to kill them, as even with the special attacks, I just couldn’t see them being killable. To respawn, btw, you need to drag your ‘monk’ statue into one of the force fields.. but a fair warning: If you place your Monk Statue near one of the stone… dogs? A collision detection error hits and you are unable to move. You can still shoot and defend your base from a static position. This happened several times over the course of the game, which mildly annoyed me, though not nearly as much as the “Firefox wants to stop an unresponsive script” window that kept on popping up more times that I can count.
In the end, I liked the game. It could be a very fun multiplayer game if done in a proper platform. One that’s far, far away from the browser.
Update: If you’d rather look at videos instead of Screenshots, the authors have provided three Youtube videos to look at: [1] [2] [3].
I’ve also added a “Controls & Info” link to the thread of the game, where you can contact the authors directly
Hi Nushio !
I’m UniqueVN – one of the author of this game. Thanks you for spending your time play the
game and write the review for it!
As you can see, we chose the 1024×768 resolution for the game which is a good size for the game but not for the performance. We did several optimizations for the map rendering which improved the performance but sadly it’s not enough. I recommend you to try the game in Chrome since we mostly test the game there instead of Firefox. In Chrome, only in a large battle that you can see the frame rate drop.
I do apology for the collision bug with your monk statue, that bug annoyed me too but I found out about it too late and no time to properly fix it.
You can check our game’s thread in the forum: http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/monk-story – we recorded a play session and uploaded it to youtube so you can check it out the end game.
“. It could be a very fun multiplayer game if done in a proper platform.” => we have same idea
We did design this game as a multiplayer game in mind. Right now, we’re busy with work but hope that we can resume the work on this game soon.
Thanks again!!!
I’m glad you liked the review!
I’m also glad to hear that optimizations were done to improve performance. I’m not really a Chrome user, but I’ll give it a try.
The monk statue bug collision was annoying but nothing that can’t be worked around, once you know about the bug.
I’ll add a link to the youtube video and the thread up above, so that readers can find it easily.
I figured multiplayer was the next goal, but given the limited time, we do have to cut many features just to get a game polished.
I’m looking forward to the game’s improvements! Good luck!