Monster House surprises everyone with an enjoyable, fast paced and challenging adventure.
User Rating: 8.1 | Monster House GBA
Monster House for the GameBoy Advance is the game based on the movie of the same name. If you can not seen the movie, the story follows three children, D.J., Chowder and Jenny. The game picks up at the point of the movie where D.J., Chowder and Jenny must enter the Monster House and destroy it before it starts eatting all the unsuspecting children looking for candy on Halloween night. Monster House is a basic puzzle solving and duegon crawling adventure game but it may seem a bit familiar when you first pick it up. Monster House plays, feels, and sounds just the GameBoy Advance Legend of Zelda games. Even some of the animations such as holding a pot or using a key to open a door are the same. Now, in Monster House your health is represented by candy and after you defeat a boss your health will increase by one. As you might remember, Legend of Zelda is represented by hearts but everytime you defeat a boss your health increases by one. Monster House even sports the same camera view. Now many people would call this "ripping off" but I call it inspiration. The teams at THQ and A2M clearly loved the Legend of Zelda franchise and it shows. Now, as a movie based game, well, first you would expect it to be bad. Then you would expect it to be easy. Well, neither of those apply to Monster House. You will face many challenging puzzles in Monster House that will keep you business for a while. And when your not solving puzzles your fighting monster chairs and such. Monster House mixs the difficulty of puzzles solving with the thrill of combat perfectly. Much like what the Legend of Zelda series does. Now, it may seem like Monster House is a cheap rip-off of Legend of Zelda but this is far from the truth. One of the best features of Monster House is no where to be seen in Legend of Zelda. At any point in the game, you can switch between D.J., Chowder and Jenny. Each child is armed with a different water gun. D.J.'s water gun is a balanced gun that shots a strong blast that knocks the enemy backwards. Chowder's water gun is not very powerful. It shots slow short bursts and when charged shoots three small blasts. And finally, Jenny has a machine gun-like water gun. It shoots many quick strong bursts at once. Each character's water gun is helpful for each kind of enemy. For example, DJ is good for destroying monster chairs, Chowder is good for destroying monster lamps and Jenny is good for destroying big enemies such as monster bookcases. But the water guns are not the only advantage to switching characters. Each character has their own unique ability. D.J. can climb debris covered walls. Although every character can push objects, but Chowder has the ability to push big objects such as bookcases. And Jenny is small enough to climb into crawl spaces and find hidden areas. Each ability is important and required to move through the story. Also, probably the best thing about switching characters, all characters have the own health bars. So, if one character is low on health you can simply switch to a different character. The graphics of Monster House fit the personality perfectly. D.J., Chowder and Jenny all look small compared to the other objects of the house. And while the enemies are pretty quiet they look great and flow with the theme of the house perfectly. The Monster House is a big house and each floor is represented differently with various themes and different objects that fit each theme perfectly. And finally, Monster House remains very faithful to the movie and actions play out just like in the movie which is sometimes rare in a movie based games.
Monster House does get quite repetitive after a while. You'll find yourself faced with the same puzzle as before. And then faced with the same enemy that you faced a couple rooms back. Monster House basiclly repeats the same four puzzles throughout the game. Although, they remain challenging you feel like you are doing the same thing over and over again. Also, there are not many different enemies in the game. You'll get to a point where all enemies are upgraded to a harder version but they act look and feel the same. The upgraded versions just add a bit more challenge of the game.
There are only about 10 different tracks in Monster House. Maybe less. And all are pretty uninspired and boring. You'll be quite influeneced to play the game on mute because the music just gets repetitive and boring very quickly. It would have been great to have the same soundtrack from the movie into the game but I understand that that could be tough for the GameBoy Advance.
