A stumbling Monster Walk
The new location based game is a mess of game mechanics made worse by significant bugs and crashes.
Times are tough for fans of location based games. The few that I’ve come across seem to be small studios trying to build a portfolio of presentable, but half-finished mobile games, perhaps to attract contract work for more lucrative projects.
Darkane by Terahype, for one, is a totally acceptable, bland fantasy monster battling game that I tried for a bit, but it quickly became clear the game had otherwise been abandoned by its developer.
That “coming soon” has been there for a very long time.
I’m happy to see smaller game developers mess around in the genre as the genre desperately needs experimentation, but so far these entries are largely aping Pokemon Go. App stores are already a graveyard of better games that have failed that approach.
Still, I’ve got a Google Alert set up to try and catch new releases and every once in a (rare) while it actually works. The alert picked up an announcement via PocketGamer.biz about a (then) incoming game called Monster Walk, made by the folks behind Run Legends which I’ve had on my phone for ages and played a bit back when I was still running for exercise (a bad knee put a stop to that). I swear I wrote a blog about it, but apparently not. I think, probably, because Run Legends didn’t have much “game” to it at the time and I didn’t find much in it to talk about.
Monster Walk continues Talofa Games’ steps-based design where the player earns game “stamina” via their phone’s pedometer. If the player walks a bunch, they can do more in the game. At a high level, Monster Walk has the player exploring grid-based levels, harvesting resources, encountering and battling monsters, and then recruiting defeated monsters to their team for future fights.
I’ll say right up front that my experience with Monster Walk has been rough as the game is very, very buggy. I downloaded and played the day it launched on iOS and immediately encountered multiple hard crashes. Even now, months later, I’m still encountering soft locks with quests, buggy UI, and more. To Talofa’s credit they’ve been pushing updates at a frequent cadence, but this game came out of the oven half-baked and unfortunately, and I really hate to be this mean: this game is a disaster.
The issues I’ve encountered aren’t deep into the game but right in the starting area. Basic QA testing would have–should have–revealed these significant problems before anyone outside the company touched the game and assuming there was such testing, there’s no way the developers didn’t know about the mess they were launching. I’m sure there are very good reasons for why Talofa launched Monster Walk when they did–you only have so much runway as a startup–but the game is not ready for public consumption.
I joined Monster Walk’s Discord server to report a few bugs and to seek clarification on some progression issues I was having with the game (turns out that I wasn’t served an important tutorial screen or two thanks to those game crashes). At the time of this publication I’m still soft locked on a quest and unable to progress with no comment from anyone on the team. The Discord is surprisingly active with players and a handful of moderators, but doesn’t seem to be frequented by a community manager or anyone actually on the dev team.
Mainly I’m annoyed because I can taste some good ingredients in the poorly executed dish that is Monster Walk. I’ve come to prefer location based games that use pedometers since I don’t want to stop and take out my phone when I’m on a walk. Recently, I regretted letting my son play Pokemon Go on a long hike. That game has gotten very bloated and it turned into more stopping and staring at the screen than actual hiking. (After a while I convinced him to load Pikmin Bloom instead.) I like how Monster Walk applies its “stamina” system. You walk around in real life and the next time you’re sitting on the couch you get to explore more of the game’s map.
I think it’s a fruitful design approach that I’d like to see taken further, but I don’t think Monster Walk is the game to do it. Even if the game wasn’t a buggy mess, it’s a game design mess. A lack of a unifying purpose is the game’s greatest problem and it tries to hide it with a mishmash of game mechanics. The story states that the player is here to rescue monsters from some mysterious magical fog invading their homeland, but also for some reason we’re strip-mining the land’s stone and wood resources as we go? And continuing the colonialist trend, we then put the monsters we rescue to work in little stations to earn even more resources?
According to someone in the game’s Discord there was an opening cutscene that better explains the plot but, sigh, the game crashed right when I first opened it and I never saw the cutscene. Based on what I’ve experienced from the rest of the game, however, I suspect it wouldn’t have been riveting worldbuilding anyway, and I doubt it would have satisfactorily connected the game’s central mechanics with any sort of interesting theme.
The writing in the game is very… precious.
Games are hard to make and there’s nothing that’ll discover hidden issues better than having a bunch of random strangers banging on your work. However, Monster Walk launched poorly with problems that were foreseeable. Maybe one day Talofa can dig the game out of its hole, but instability aside, the game is missing a central, defining theme and its motley assortment of game mechanics haven’t successfully hidden that weak foundation.
