Monty's Madness

Sometimes a bit of mindless fun is all you need to let go of the stress for a couple of minutes and just take your mind off all your problems. This is why video games work so well most of the time, especially since you can start and stop playing whenever you want, theoretically. However, they must be well-designed in order to keep their flavor for a long time and make the players come back for more.

Monty’s Madness is a fun arcade game in which you have to place traps in order to keep cars from getting past the bridge. It’s not a complicated formula at all, but it’s fun enough to keep you engaged for a few minutes, at least until the mechanics become repetitive and annoying. In fact, the replay value is pretty low for a game such as this one, which is a bit of a bummer.

The goal is to abduct vehicles using UFOs or powerful magnets, but those are pretty expensive to purchase at first, which means that you have to use smaller traps to slow down the cars. Hence, you can use catapults and a variety of other methods to keep the cars from getting past the bridge. You can even raise barriers that temporarily halt the traffic on an entire lane.

In case you are wondering how you know whether you are winning or losing, the danger bar displays how safe or how dangerous the pass is considered by drivers. Hence, you lose if the bar goes all the way to safe, because your goal is to scare everyone and let as few people through as possible. It doesn’t make too much sense at first, but the why and how are not really important in a game such as this one.

The graphics are decent, on the other hand, even if they are pretty rough when it comes to the 3D models that represent the cars and the buildings. On top of that, the camera angle you are forced to use is pretty bad, even if you are allowed to rotate the camera as you see fit. The fixed angle is horrible, however, especially since you are supposed to build things and place them strategically.

In the end, Monty's Madness gets rather stale after a while, especially since nothing really changes along the way except for the traffic density. Other than that, there are no new maps or traps to unlock, so it gets boring in record time. Even so, this can be a fun activity for when you have nothing better to do for a few minutes.