Whimsy Gaming

Update: I Am Monster

Pik Pok, more like…Pik…Schlock…

I recently reviewed Pik Pok’s I Am Monster, a charming idle game with a good premise, lots of promise, and a Godzilla-sized mountain of issues. You can check out my review of that title here. In short, the game has great visuals and a solid premise…but it’s marred by Pik Pok’s seeming lack of a desire to fix any of its existing issues and, instead, double down on a “pay to win” mentality that will ultimately, I feel, dig the game into an ever-deeper hole that even Rogzora won’t be able to scrabble themself out of.

As I said in my I Am Monster review, there are some fairly glaring issues with the game – bugs that range from minor, even amusing, to downright game-breaking that can cost the player a boss battle and require them to close out of the game. I am not the sort of person that necessarily holds bugs against a developer – especially on the mobile scene where the culture is to shove things out as quickly as possible – but I do keep an eye on them. I, and most gamers, expect bugs to be fixed in time, and when a developer releases an update that not only leaves bugs in but also adds “pay to win” features…well, that fails to ingratiate me to the developer and their product.

Case in point, Pik Pok’s most recent update (recent herein being a couple weeks ago) added several new purchasing options…options that allow players to get a foot up in events by spending crystals (the game’s premium currency) for extra “milestone” points. This is, straight up, spending money to improve your standing in the game, and in a game like I Am Monster where, after a certain point, events are the only reasonable way to advance your characters, this borders on extortion.

Let me explain (since I didn’t go into great detail about events in my previous review): in I Am Monster, you collect a roster of amusing b-movie monster parodies, including Rogzora, a Godzilla analogue, and Goriko, a giant ape that looks suspiciously like King Kong in pro-wrestling shorts. The characters are, as I said in my review, absolutely the stars of the show, and a clear high-point of the game. And Pik Pok knows it. Like most mobile games (or any game, really) that focuses heavily on collection, there’s little reason to play the game outside of collecting the game’s characters. And I don’t have any problem with that, especially in a game with characters as interesting and well-designed as I Am Monster. And to be entirely fair, Pik Pok does make it fairly trivial to collect the entire roster of colorful and amusing beasties.

It’s when you start talking about actually powering them up that we run into a bit of a snag.

The collection mechanic in this game has players spending crystals to use the by-now ubiquitous “summoning portal,” which has a chance to deliver unto you a new monster friend. Usually, you’ll get monster DNA instead of a full monster, which comes in several rarities that are used at varying stages in your giant critter’s growth cycle to power them up further, from one star to five. Each “star” level comes with a growth spurt and a hike in power levels, which obviously allows your monsters to smash better, faster, and more amusingly, as well as gaining access to new “talents” to improve their abilities.

Still pretty standard stuff so far. Pik Pok was even kind enough to include a mechanic that allows you to trade in ten of one type of DNA for the next stage of DNA – for example, ten common DNA can be traded in for one rare; ten rare DNA can be traded in for one epic; epic to legendary; etceteras, all the way up to mythic.

If you’re following along, you might already see a little snag. Basic math tells us that you’ll need 10,000 common DNA (which, as the name suggests, is far and above the most common thing you’ll get) to get just one mythic DNA. And in order to fully enhance your monster one star level you’ll need multiple of each stage of DNA (I think 10, but it’s kind of unclear). The summoning portal doesn’t always give you common DNA, and you get (usually common) DNA from other places in the game – like when you defeat a monster boss, as a purchasable item in the cache (more on this later), and the occasional free gift – but it’s still a slow trickle no matter how you shake it.

And I don’t think I need to tell anyone that 10,000 is a really big number.

And then there’s the crystal economy. You’ll get one free summon a day, but after that, you’ll need to spend your hard-earned crystals for your shot at monster juice. It costs 250 crystals per summon – which is conveniently the same amount you receive at each level up! So for some time, the amount of times you’ll be able to use the summoning portal is pretty regular, based entirely on how quickly you progress and how quickly you level up, and like I said, you’ll probably collect the entire (un-powered-up) roster pretty quickly, before this trickle of free currency ceases.

But the level cap is 50. And after that, the only way to get crystals is by doing missions, which award a paltry five per mission, of which you can do seven of every six-ish hours, plus an extra 15 if you do all seven for a grand total of 50 crystals.

Oh the luxury. Oh the extravagance. Oh the generosity.

I’m being facetious, of course, 50 ever six hours isn’t an awful pace – it allows for a summon every day or so on top of the free summon you get daily, and since you’re guaranteed a monster (or a legendary monster DNA) every 10 summons, your gains aren’t awful if you can complete your requisite number of missions.

Thanks, Julie! Apocalypses are my favorite.

But that’s a pretty big if, especially when you consider one of the missions on the six-hour cycle is always to perform a summon. And often, you’ll also see a mission to buy something from the cache, and all of the items in the cache cost, surprise of surprise, crystals. And if you can’t do one or both of these missions, you also forfeit your 15 crystal reward for completing all of your (seven) missions. So that’s 20-25 crystals that are just unattainable if you don’t want to spend 250+ crystals to complete them. Which is…counter intuitive to say the least.

Unless you pay for the subscription, which is roughly $10 per month and grants you access to additional missions beyond the seven, giving you some freedom to complete seven missions for your 15-crystal reward if you don’t want to (or can’t) spend your hard-earned crystals on summoning. Of course, this also grants you crystals per day and a duplicate DNA when summoning on top of the additional missions and, honestly, I have to admit that it’s not a terrible value if you’re willing to spend money on the game (especially considering how many games I’ve seen with the troubling trend of going towards weekly subscriptions rather than monthly).

Anyways, what I’m getting at with this lengthy, long-winded blather is that it’s a slow grind to get your monsters leveled up even past two stars (once again, out of five).

That’s where events come in.

Every two or three days, there’s an event focused on a certain monster, and this is where your big gains are in terms of monster DNA and overall power. Events are PvP in that you compete with other monster wranglers for points, which are based on how many “milestones” you complete. Milestones are awarded after a certain number of bosses are defeated, and with each new milestone you get increased power within the event and occasionally common or even rare monster DNA if you get far enough in the event. These gains are nice, but the real draw of the events are the rewards when you win (as you would expect) which, if you rank in the top 10, are fairly nice to get your monster up to three and maybe even four stars.

Getting to five stars, even winning every single event for that monster (which could be weeks or even months apart), is still a complete and utter slog.

Enter Pik Pok with the answer! Microtransactions!

Now, instead of actually playing the game, you can spend your hard-earned crystals to buy milestones! What could go wrong?

Well, as it turns out, a lot could go wrong. It alienates free-to-play players, makes it easier for them to simply get left in the dust. With this update, Pik Pok has made a clear statement: “our game is balanced for people who are willing to pay,” meaning that anyone who was just looking for a free-to-play experience can only ever expect to pick up the table scraps left over by those with more money. Add to this the fact that there are still numerous bugs I’ve noticed in common between versions, meaning Pik Pok absolutely prioritized this pay-to-win mechanic over actually fixing the numerous problems with their game, not to mention promised features like save game transfers, which were promised to be in the next version but don’t appear to be.

Even worse, it seems, without a restriction on when you can purchase these milestones, that a whale could just come cresting out of the deep blue internet at the last minute and leave everyone in the dust. While this does create a sense of tension and competition, that you’re never truly “safe” in the standings, it breaks the cardinal rule of game monetization: never allow your players to simply buy progress. There’s nothing worse than working hard for something only to have it yanked away at the last second by someone who just cashed their paycheck and funneled it directly into the game.

Of course, this is exactly what Pik Pok wants, to create an environment where its players are basically bidding on who will win the event. Add to this the fact that simply being able to buy milestones will make it difficult for anyone but Pik Pok themselves to identify cheaters – something the game has had a problem with since day one – from the people that simply have very deep pockets (the cynic in me thinks this might be a feature and not a bug as far as Pik Pok is concerned) and you have so many reasons why this is just an awful idea.

There’s a great deal more I could say about this, but I’ve already had this sitting in my drafts for a week, so I’ll just leave you with this friendly reminder: when I purchased my new phone and eagerly went to install I Am Monster and found out the game lacked any cloud save functionality – a point I harped on in my review out of pure spite – I was told specifically that the functionality to transfer your save game to a new device (or to simply recover from a catastrophic phone crash, which also happened to me…twice…) was coming in the next patch. I was literally told this. Obviously this didn’t happen as this basic and, let’s face it, very basic functionality still appears to be AWOL. So, instead of giving the promised feature of being able to transfer your progress from one device to the next, they gave us a way to spend more money on the game.

I hope I don’t need to say why this is absolutely fucked up.

In short, Pik Pok has made its charming but utterly flawed game even less appealing, and I hope its playerbase abandons ship like so many civilians from a city under attack by a 300 foot-tall monster.

I suppose it’s poetic if you look at it that way, but Rogzora and his pals deserve better.

Disclosure: I downloaded a few of the screenshots in this blog entry from users in the I Am Monster Facebook group rather than taking them myself because I needed shots from events and since I uninstalled the game, I could no longer access events without playing the game again for a couple hours. And while I was willing to re-download the game to play through the tutorial, I was not interested in putting much more time than that into it.

Starscapes Review

Just what the doctor ordered

As those of you who follow the mobile gaming scene know, Nintendo’s recent foray into the medium just dropped in the last couple of days: a reimagining of the old classic, Dr. Mario. Like many my age, I grew up on the NES, and Dr. Mario was an exceptional Tetris-clone – a puzzle game with a Mario aesthetic, similar enough to the venerable puzzle game it drew its likeness from but with a unique twist…and did I mention the Mario aesthetic? We were nuts for Mario back then.

I’ve opened the app a few times, but between real-life drama and a general malaise that’s been hovering over me for the past week or so, I’ve not given it much time to get acquainted. Part of that, though, seems to be the same complaint as most people on the app store have been voicing: it’s boring. An unimaginative Candy Crush clone with a Mario aesthetic…and as much as we love Mario, we’re not still so nuts for him that we’ll eat up anything with his face on it anymore. And whereas the original Dr. Mario changed up the Tetris formula enough in the day to make itself relevant and grab our attention, the game’s new mobile entry doesn’t do enough new to do the same today.

Another reason I’ve not been giving it more of a fair shake is because I recently became absorbed by another puzzle game, one that has been far more worthy of my attention: Starscapes.

This deceptively-simple match-three game has a surprising amount of depth and character hidden beneath its cutesy exterior. The premise, as with most mobile games, is simple: match three or more colored spheres together and defeat all the enemies, called Keplers (possibly named after 16th century astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler?) on the stage. Your task is aided by a team of four-plus-one (the plus one being borrowed from a friend) allies, called Starmates, who use their abilities to help attack the Keplers or otherwise assist in clearing the stages. You’re rated on your performance at the end of each stage, receive your reward, and then do it all again.

Still with me so far?

The appeal of the game is that its depth in no way mars its simplicity. Starscapes is never more than a match-three game, itself a simple premise, but the tools you have at your disposal, your Starmates, change the way you play in minor but still somehow significant ways. Starmate abilities are quite varied, with some that summon piles of a certain colored sphere, some that destroy spheres, some that attack enemies, and even one that simply increases your score count and makes it easier to reach the three-star rating. Your choice of Starmate will change the way you play in subtle ways, and you’re free to adjust your playstyle on the fly depending on what each stage calls for.

Or, if you’re like me, you just pick the bunny and just stick with it through the entire game despite the fact that it’s far from the most useful character.

You’re never punished for sticking with your favorite characters, which I always appreciate, but you’re also rewarded for composing a team of Starmates that works well together, or that has abilities that are helpful for a specific stage.

The game’s combo mechanic is another interesting nuance. Rather than ending as soon as matches stop being made, your combo counter, and subsequently your stage score, will keep going up as long as you continue to play spheres. This means you can, theoretically, keep the combo going indefinitely, up until the point you run out of moves and the stage ends. This can be a good way to continue to rack up points for those much-coveted three-star ratings. However, since your Starmates won’t “refresh” as long as the combo’s still going, and you also earn points at the end of the stage depending on how many moves you had left, there’s an interesting balancing aspect to the game.

Do you keep slamming down spheres to keep the combo going up? Or do you let it drop so you can use your Starmates? I’ve had plenty of stages in which I’ve lost the stage altogether because I was too focused on racking up points and forgot to take out one, last, pesky Kepler. It’s endlessly frustrating, but in the best possible way, and no matter how many times I’ve failed, I’ve never felt like it was because I didn’t have the right characters or because in some way I lacked the necessary skill (or monetary contribution, as can be the case with some puzzle games). I just hunkered down and went right back in again with my cute friends from the stars and a renewed hope that this would be the time.

The best part of the game is that though the Starmate premise makes Starscapes ripe for gacha-style exploitative bullshit, the game’s creators, JoyTap games, has resisted the temptation. You can spend money on the game’s premium currency (diamonds…because it’s always gems for some reason) and use that for a better shot at the rarer Starmates, but not only is it fairly easy to get them through gameplay alone, but it’s also quite easy to rack up a pile of diamonds just by playing the game. And besides that, the rare Starmates aren’t necessarily better, and it’s easy enough to just build a team around the common characters and do just fine with that – in fact, one of the most useful characters I’ve found is Laika, the game’s mascot, a dog Starmate that you get for free right at the beginning of the game.

The game appeals to high-score completionists and collectors alike. The goal of achieving three-star ratings on every stage is very alluring, but there’s also a definite “gotta catch ’em all” vibe with the game’s Starmate cast. Getting three stars on a stage gives you more rewards and more chances to get new Starmates or materials to upgrade them, so there’s an excuse even for casual players just in it for the cute animals to strive for each stage’s high score, if only to have more food to feed their friends and make them cuter.

Starscapes is a triumph because it avoids the traditional pitfalls of mobile gaming. There are gacha elements for players who have money to burn, but its entirely unnecessary to enjoy the game and you get new characters at a fairly decent pace just by playing the game. There’s a stamina system, but it’s fairly easy to recover it for longer play sessions. You can choose to spend a small amount of diamonds for either a health refill or a slightly-larger-but-still-reasonable amount for unlimited stamina for three hours, or you can just accumulate these stamina-refilling items via the end-of-games rewards. I still think the stamina system in Starscapes, as in every game, is a mistake, but it’s at least mitigated in one of the least intrusive ways I’ve seen. Which is good, because I’ve rarely experienced the oft-mentioned “just one more turn” phenomenon that some gamers talk about when playing games like Civilization, but I’ve definitely had some sessions of Starscapes that went on longer than I’d initially intended.

Seriously, I’ve lost sleep over this game. And given how much I like sleep, that’s some of the highest praise I can give a game.

Gameplay: What seems like stock-standard match-three gameplay is improved significantly with the inclusion of a variety of enemies to defeat, characters to collect and show off, and powers to manage. There’s some depth here, but a depth that doesn’t mar the experience. It’s approachable for the casual players, but there’s an appeal for high-score completionists as well.

The bottom-line gameplay is solid, the powers are fairly well-balanced, and the game itself is a lot of fun to play. The balance between frantic play to keep ahead of your combo count and the desire to slow down and approach the stages methodically is masterful.

Presentation: In a word: cute. In two words: super cute. The characters are all appealing for those who like cute character designs, and their “evolution” stages are all interesting enough to encourage you to work pretty hard to improve your favorites.

Sometimes the particle effects on the enemies can get in the way of being able to accurately tap where you want to tap, or can obscure where there’s a match to be made, but in some of these cases it’s actually intentional to add some difficulty to the stages. It can still be a bit frustrating, and though the game is never not appealing to look at, there can sometimes be a lot of stuff going on on your screen.It’s rarely enough to be distracting to a fault, however.

Value: There is absolutely no pressure to spend money on this game as you can get pretty much everything you want out of it without spending a dime. You can spend a bit of cash for a better chance at getting the Starmates you want, or for a stamina refill, but both are given with a fair amount of frequency, albeit randomly, as end-of-stage rewards.

That being said, as I’ve gone deeper and deeper into the stages and my Starmates have required more and more of their individual “medals” to evolve further, I have noticed that the game can be somewhat stingy with these specific character materials, making it almost impossible to push my favorite bunny and sheep duo into their final stages. I get that these final evolutions should be for the most-devoted of players (which I would consider myself being at this point, if we’re being honest), but considering they’re two of the most common characters, I wouldn’t think they’d be the most difficult to improve. At this point, it’s probably a personal frustration and not a flaw in the game itself, but I have only noticed this difficulty in the newest update, which added a lot of personalization to the game (including the ability to decorate your Starmates’ little apartments, which, let’s be honest, is amazing), so it might simply be a balance issue that needs to be tweaked…

…or it could be the game devs realizing they needed to meet some arbitrary bullshit quota because their game wasn’t exploitative enough.

Let’s hope it’s not the latter.

Overall: Overall, I’ve enjoyed the hell out of this game, and I’m not what one would consider a connoisseur of the match-three genre. I find that this sort of game usually boils down to either Tetris or Candy Crush, reskinned with very little added to the formula to make each entry fresh and new. And while Starscapes certainly borrows elements from other games that came before, it does enough new beyond simply its appealing coat of paint that I think it’s well worth the time of newcomers and aficionados of the genre alike.

At the end of the day: If you like match-three games, you owe it to yourself to give Starscapes a try. If you’ve never played a match-three game but like to collect adorable little alien animals, you owe it to yourself to give Starscapes a try. If you have a functioning mobile device made in the last decade with access to an online store that has Starscapes on it, you owe it to yourself to give Starscapes a try.

In short: you owe it to yourself to give Starscapes a try. It’s a shining gem on the dung heap that is the mobile gaming market and it’s well-worth your time.

It’s a good game.

I Am Monster Review

A Monster Disappointment

I Am Monster is an idle game from New Zealand-based developer Pik Pok, a fairly prolific purveyor of games on the mobile scene. If you’re a connoisseur of the genre like myself, you may recognize them as the name behind games like Into the Dead, Dungeon, Inc, and a few collaborative efforts with Adult Swim (Adventure Xpress, Robot Unicorn Attack 2) and Dreamworks Pictures (Turbo Fast). So, with such a practiced hand behind it, it’s really no surprise that I Am Monster is as solid of an entry into the mobile storefront as it is.

Though, with such a practiced hand behind it, its flaws are likewise that much more inexcusable.

The premise of the game is simple: your stable of giant, monster movie wannabes trample around the city, district by district, getting stronger so they can continue lowering the property values (and the skyline). Mechanically, it’s a fairly stock-standard idle game, but it’s dolled up in a pretty appealing package. As your monsters stomp, they gain energy; as they gain energy, you spend energy on their “squad stats” – attack, skill (damage), and health. The stronger they get, the more districts they can smash through and the more giant military robots and enemy monsters they can lay low for even better rewards. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s a unique use of the idle game template and, ultimately, it works fairly well at its core.

The city is organized into districts, the game’s version of levels or stages, and after a certain amount of districts, you’ll fight a boss. Most of the bosses are a variety of military mechs, Voltron-looking jerks who are out to put an end to your old-fashioned city-wreckin’ good time. Every few iterations of these mechs will be replaced by a rogue monster, which are tougher, and can wipe out your entire team in one fell swoop if you’re not careful (or even completely independent of your own level of care…more on this later).

As you proceed through the game, you’ll summon more monsters for your overeager wrecking crew. This can be done one of two ways, either by gaining enough “monster DNA” to create the monster from scratch or by saving up enough crystals (the game’s premium currency) to summon the monster wholesale from the “portal.” This is the game’s gacha element, but since there aren’t very many monsters in general, and because the game guarantees you a new monster within 10 summoning sessions, it won’t take most players terribly long to collect them all, even with little to no monetary investment in the game.

The monsters are the stars of the show, and Pik Pok put a lot of love into its cast. The game has an intensely pleasing amount character – the art and character design are top notch, and it looks very pretty for a mobile game. Its visuals are excellent and absolutely the game’s strongest selling point, and they’re ultimately what keeps me opening the game day after day, hour after hour. Pik Pok obviously put a lot of work into making its stars pop as much as possible, and whatever the ultimate verdict of I Am Monster, they succeeded in this much at least.

Each monster, based on old monster movie tropes, has an insane amount of character, practically jumping off the screen – from Godzilla-like Ragzora to his metallic doppelganger Mecha Zora to King Kong’s professional wrestling fanatic cousin Goriko to Little Shop of Horrors wannabe Chlorothorn. Some of my favorites are Phosphoria, a queen bee-type with an absolutely adorable grin; Imperia, a Mars Attacks-looking alien tentacle monster with a ton of character in her one angry eyeball; Princess Plop, a colossal blue-ribbon pig from Hell’s County Fair; and, of course, Beaster, the giant, three-eyed laser rabbit from your most adorable nightmares. There are 12 monsters in total and the concept seems rife for expansion (I personally would love to see a kraken-like giant squid and a giant spider call back to the 50’s era b-movie Tarantula!…you can have these two for free, Pik Pok). Even the monsters’ name banners are presented in the style of 50’s movie title cards appropriate for each monster. In short, it’s impossible not to fall in love with this game’s cast.

The monsters have three combat abilities each, and like with the character design, it’s clear Pik Pok put more than a bit of work into this aspect of the game as well. While your personal control of the game is minimal, there’s still the impression that each monster plays differently, with some monsters better at tearing quickly through districts to gain energy, some better at going toe-to-toe with bosses, and still some being better at support by stunning or debuffing said bosses. I’ve yet to play a monster that seems particularly weaker or stronger than the others, though to be fair, I’ve not made a specific effort to get to know each monster intimately, and my experience is necessarily tempered by what monsters the gacha gods deigned I be able to power up and make useful.

As you level up your monsters’ individual levels (independent of the attack/skill/health trifecta I mentioned earlier), you’ll also gain skill points to further empower their three abilities and add additional utility to their attacks by adding additional stun time, buffing energy gain, or even healing with each use…or just make them better at smashing. Y’know. Whatever works. It helps to add a lot of depth to an otherwise simple premise without making it overly complicated, though until you’re able to power up your monsters to higher star levels (more on this in a second) and unlock more tiers of skill improvements, you’ll have more points than you know what to do with, and the customization options come off as a bit underwhelming.

Of course, like any good gatcha, summoning the monster itself is only half (or some infinitesimally small percentage) the battle. Once you summon them, you must continue collecting the monster’s DNA, either by beating them in battle or by summoning their DNA from the portal. DNA comes in five flavors: common, rare, epic, legendary, and mythic, each corresponding to the star level of your monster. Monster battles only give you the most common DNA, which becomes all but useless after a short time leveling up the monster. Meanwhile, the rarer DNA is almost impossible to find on its own, necessitating that you craft it by mashing together 10 DNA of the previous rarity to form one of the desired rarity.

As you can guess, this becomes incredibly time-consuming. But what’s a good mobile game without a mindless grind? And I Am Monster is all about the grind. You’ll be spending a lot of time trying to power up your favorite monster and, like all gachas, the whims of fate may not be kind. You might be trying to power up your wicked-looking space dragon from the deepest abyss of the cosmos and instead get a pile of DNA for the geriatric turtle character. That’s the luck of the draw and there’s not a lot you can do to influence this unfortunate truth…besides spending money, of course.

The game has an obligatory “reset” mechanic, fittingly called “Apocalypse,” which will send your monsters back to District 1 and reset your attack/skill/health investment while maintaining the monsters’ levels, skill points, and star level. The more districts you smashed through and the more enemy bosses you laid low ‘neath your mighty monster boot, the more “Apocalypse Points” you get with each reset. You can spend these points on large, permanent boosts to your squad abilities (the attack/skill/health ones). The idea is, with each Apocalypse you’ll get further and further into the game, gathering more monster DNA and powering up your monsters so you can get even further next time.

Sound repetitive yet? Well, that’s a fair observation. But honestly, when everything’s working as planned, it all gels together for a fairly satisfying idle experience. You don’t go into this sort of game expecting thrilling, edge-of-your seat moment-to-moment gameplay. You expect to watch your monsters smash some stuff and beat a couple bosses, power them up a bit, and then turn the game off to let them continue accumulating energy while you do something else. Seriously, take a walk Craig.

Unfortunately for I Am Monster, things are rarely working in a best-case scenario type situation. As much as I enjoyed the game (I didn’t just make up a bunch of praise just to have this massive BUT moment for sting value), there’s so much that frustrates me about it. Not enough to get me to stop playing it, obviously, but enough to cause me to write a lengthy review out of spite.

I’m not proud.

With the game’s impressive visuals comes, of course, high system requirements. Granted, the phone I’m playing my main account on is pretty outdated at this point, but it’s still a source of frustration when the framerate chugs and otherwise ruins the game’s otherwise excellent presentation. Of course, that’s just the nature of the beast with video games and technology…eventually, something is going to come along to show you just how obsolete your beloved device is. I can hardly fault Pik Pok for that.

What I can fault Pik Pok for is the fact that, without any sort of cloud saves, email/social media linking, or even just a device transfer option, I can’t even play my old account on to the new phone I just bought. The new phone that runs the game just fine. Using technology as an excuse for poor game performance only goes so far when there’s no way to carry on playing said game on a new device, and when your game progress is measures by days, weeks, even months, not to mention dollars, not being able to play that same account on a new system is downright unacceptable. And that’s to say nothing about the possibility of the game being uninstalled or your phone just crashing, because without a way to preserve your data in the cloud somehow, any loss of the app from your device is going to come with a loss of hours upon hours of your time. It’s kind of baffling, honestly, that Pik Pok would release a game in this day and age without this function.

And along with the inability to transfer save data between devices, the copious amounts of glitches and bugs are similarly unacceptable. My gameplay, on both my old and new device (the latter of which I was forced to started a new account on) is marred by bugs and glitches that run the gamut from actually helpful (I had my monsters inexplicably heal completely not once but several times in a boss fight) to annoying (UI elements like the District banners not going away and obscuring portions of the screen) to downright game-breaking. On numerous occasions I have had to give up on a boss fight because my monsters would disappear, or their portrait would no longer appear on my UI so I couldn’t switch to them (switching monsters quickly and often is a very important aspect to the game, particularly in boss fights), or their abilities would not trigger when I pushed the button, or the UI would just scrunch the monsters’ portraits so close together that I couldn’t even select one – honestly, the number of bizarre bugs I’ve gotten in this game would impress Todd Howard.

I’m not saying I Am Monster is unplayable – far from it. But it’s unpolished in the extreme. It feels weird to say this after spending so long praising the game’s outstanding visuals, but on a mechanical level, the game absolutely does not measure up to its presentation.

There’s more than a few problems with the game’s mechanics as well. There’s a pretty good flow to your progression through the districts and the bosses, but after awhile, you’ll just…hit a wall. And I’m not talking about a wall you saw coming either. This is a wall that just jumped out in front of you out of nowhere, causing you to smash into it, break your nose, and possibly get a concussion. In most of my time playing through the districts in Apocalypse mode, I’ll be cruising along, not a care in the world, when I’ll finally get to a boss (usually one of the monsters) that’ll just wipe out my team with a single ability.

Of course, difficulty scaling as a problem is subjective, and there’s always going to be a barrier that you can’t cross. Your monsters’ power is not limitless. But that limit seems to pop up incredibly abruptly. It’s like you’re playing through the roster of an Elementary chess team, having a grand old time, when suddenly, out of nowhere, Bobby Fisher shows up and slaps you with the glove. I mean, it’s not every day a dead chess legend challenges you to a match so you have to step up, but you know you’re going to get creamed.

To strain this analogy further, in this scenario, you also have a small, random chance to have all your pieces be swapped out with…like…super pawns or something (I don’t know, I’m not a chess player), and sometimes, you’ll inexplicably be given the first 50 moves, as if Mr. Fisher was giving you history’s greatest head start.

Ok, it’s time to drop this analogy.

What I mean is, in a lot of these instant-death scenarios, your ability to win or lose is actually contingent on the AI deciding whether or not to use its skills. As I alluded to before, the game has two types of damage: attack damage and skill damage. Attack damage is going to be your automatic damage, inflicted by your monsters mighty tread or the occasional stomp, slap, or bite. The point is, you don’t control it. Meanwhile, your monsters’ skill damage is the damage caused by their abilities, and this is going to be your boss-killer damage when you get further into the game and your attack damage isn’t enough.

So in these insta-death scenarios, your ability to win hinges on whether or not the AI decides to use their one ability that will wipe you out instantly before you’re able to spam enough abilities to lay your nemesis low.

It may sound like I’m belaboring this point, or like this is just sour grapes after losing so many times, but it’s just such an abrupt, flow-breaking experience to be sailing along and to suddenly reach an enemy that can effortlessly defeat you…but only if they choose to. And of course, when I say that your ability to win hinges on your ability to spam your monsters’ skills, that itself is contingent on the game allowing you to spam your abilities, as sometimes it resists your button presses…y’know, just for the added challenge.

With a small cast of monsters and a guaranteed monster summon every ten tries, it won’t take long for you to add every available monster to your roster, but as I mentioned before, making them all viable and useful will take some time and luck. The DNA-accumulation to power up your monsters is slow but steady, and though it could stand to be a bit more generous, I Am Monster has a decent flow. It’ll take you a lot of time to get Ragzora up to his full five-star majesty, but the journey is half the fun in games like these.

Unfortunately, like with the gameplay and presentation, there are more than a few foibles making the game stumble in the value department as well. Firstly, the game is fairly generous with its premium currency…up to a point. Every level you get 250 crystals (the game’s premium currency), which is enough to perform one summon and all but ensures that you’ll have enough to summon all of the monsters eventually. But even after completing the roster, summoning remains the best way to pick up monster DNA in any decent, usable quantity since you only get the lowest rarity of DNA from actual gameplay and that becomes all but useless after your monster starts working on their third star. However, there is a level cap, after which the flow of crystals slows to a trickle. Fortunately, you continue to get one summon a day, and instead of a whole monster every 10 summons, you get one piece of legendary DNA, which is a nice compromise. Unfortunately, this is the point in which your progress on advancing your monsters seems to slow to a crawl.

Unless you spend money, of course.

Of course, there are always the events. Every two days or so, the game runs special events based on a single monster du jour. If you want Princess Plop, for example (and honestly, who wouldn’t?), you can wait for her event and have a chance to accumulate a modest to generous supply of her DNA. Of course, in order to get the best DNA, you need to rank high at the end of the event…and the rankings are, of course, competitive. So not only are you competing with the game’s requisite whale community, but you’re also competing against a bevy of cheaters, which I Am Monster seems to have in no small supply. I can’t speak to how prolific cheaters are in the game, but I do know that Pik Pok has specifically come out and said that they’ve prioritized rooting out these poor sports. And you know you have a pretty significant problem when even the developer admits they have a problem.

Like with most of the game’s flaws, this wasn’t bad enough for me to stop playing…which I guess is a boon in the end. For all of its flaws, I Am Monster remains just charming enough, just fun enough, to keep me coming back for more. But it always garners a fresh batch of sighs at some new annoyance every time, keeping it from being truly exceptional.

The Verdict

Gameplay: Simple and hands-off, the gameplay at its core is good, but it’s marred by a plethora of bugs that can resist your attempts to actually have any input. For the most part, I Am Monster is true to its idle game label, though, and you’ll spend most of your time either just watching your monsters or with the game closed, accumulating energy while you do other things. Fairly par for the course, bugs aside. It can grow old after awhile without new gameplay modes or features, but most people will go into the experience knowing what to expect.

Presentation: In a word: outstanding. One of the best looking mobile games I’ve ever played, though this can cause the game to chug on older devices. Maybe wait until you upgrade your phone before getting into I Am Monster if your device is more than a few years old.

Value: With the level-cap stymieing your crystal gain, the game lures you in with a lot of value up front, only to choke back on it when you really need it. Summoning is still a crapshoot, and the events are unreliable at best when you’re competing against whales and cheaters. Overall, not the worst value on the market, but there’s more than a bit of pressure to spend money to get ahead…or to just keep up.

The game has the by-now expected crystal bundles encouraging you to spend more to get better value for money, as well as a subscription service which has you spending money monthly in order to receive daily crystals, more missions (and with them more rewards), and doubling your DNA-gain. This seems like a good deal, but I can’t help but feel like asking for a steady flow of money for a game with this many problems and no obvious signs that they’ll be fixing them any time soon is asking for trouble. Far better to use the tried and true VIP method with greater rewards depending on how much you’ve spent over your time with the app. The subscription service feels…optimistic in a way that they haven’t earned. But at the end of the day, the rewards seem to make it a decent deal, if you’re planning on spending time with the game to make it worthwhile.

Overall: Disappointing. Nothing about I Am Monster is bad enough to get me to stop playing (yet), but the fact that I still can’t transfer my save data to a device that can run it properly remains a major sticking point with me.

Yes, I’m petty.

The fact that so many of the game’s problems are fixable (the aforementioned data problem and the copious amount of recurring bugs) is promising, and it will be nice to see it when Pik Pok gets their act together (if Pik Pok gets their act together). For now, I Am Monster remains a disappointing but charming entry into the mobile marketplace and you could do far worse.

At the end of the day, I Am Monster is a game with a lot going for it and a lot of potential, but until I’ve seen that Pik Pok is serious about capitalizing on that potential and fixing the fairly significant problems it has, it’ll remain a disappointment and a prime example of squandered potential.