Platform: Nintendo DS

Developer: A2M (Artificial Mind and Movement)

Publisher: THQ

Release Date: July 18th, 2006

Genre: Top-Down Shooter, Action/Adventure

Nerd Rating: 4 out of 10!

Recently I have been going through and playing some of my old Nintendo DS games, and I actually reviewed Alex Rider: Stormbreaker just a few weeks ago (which coincidentally is published by THQ and is also coincidentally a movie-based game much like Monster House). While Monster House is far superior to the Stormbreaker game, it sadly isn’t that great of a game all together. Much like Stormbreaker, I was given this game as a gift when I was a child and never really liked it enough to beat it until I forced myself for review purposes. While there are games of the same name for the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo GameCube, I must warn you that they are completely different from the Nintendo DS variant.

Monster House is basically a kid-friendly action/adventure shooter game in which you shoot books, clocks, and other “monsters” with a water gun. The gameplay was not what I expected as I was hoping for decent controls with the buttons, but instead literally every button on the DS moves your character in some way and you must use the touch screen to aim and shoot your weapon in the correct direction. These controls made it very hard to effectively shoot these “monsters” and made me lose more lives than I would have with decent controls. These touch screen controls also get very repetitive on your hands and I can not see a kid, the intended audience, wanting to play this game for very long at all.

The story of Monster House is extremely simple and follows the plot of the movie quite well. You play as the three main characters from the movie, DJ Walters, Jenny Bennet, and Charles “Chowder” as you explore the house fighting monsters (that are simply furniture) and bosses in an attempt to stop the house from eating children when they come trick-or-treating later that night. How exactly a water gun is effective against furniture is beyond me.

The soundtrack of this game isn’t that good in my opinion. The main menu music sounds like it was rushed and they just combined a bunch of scary and intense music, including the Jaws countdown music. While you probably think that’s not that bad, what would you say if I said that the same music is consistent when you leave the main menu and actually play the game? The entire soundtrack just feels like a rushed combination, though they altered it slightly for the gameplay. This is a game that I cannot recommend playing with the volume on.

The cut-scenes in Monster House are better than Stormbreaker as you can tell they actually put a little work into it, however they still aren’t that good.  The cut-scenes are simply pictures of the character next to what they say and they have no voice acting at all. While this can be excused as it is a handheld title, I think at least some voice acting would’ve done wonders. Due to the fact that this game was developed with children in mind, it surprises me that there is no easy difficulty setting, just normal and hard. While the game isn’t that hard in normal mode, the controls do make it quite more challenging than it should have been.

Sadly, Monster House just isn’t a fun game to play and I cannot see a child being interested in it for more then an hour if at all. The game greatly feels like it was just rushed, from the gameplay to the music. The controls used in this game are absolute garbage, and don’t feel good on the hand. Monster House just isn’t very good, and I can’t recommend it to anyone, even to children. Perhaps some day I will be able to review a decent move-based video game, but today is definitely not that day.