It’s not a Pokemon game! Monster Sanctuary is a monster collection game, where you hatch monsters to be a part of your team, and then explore a world to battle wild monsters or other keepers in strategy heavy 3v3 battles. The world that you explore is a vast 2D platformer, where the monsters you have in your party are also your traversal abilities, this adds an extra layer of depth to your team composition, as every monster is both viable in combat, but also provides options out of it too.
Unlike a pokemon game where you start off with a scrubmon and have to build your way up the food chain, this game starts you off with one of the world’s 4 legendary “spectral” monsters, marking you as basically a chosen one. You’d think this is broken, but they do start at a low level so thats reasonable.
The battle system is significantly more strategy and combo oriented than any of this game’s contemporaries. You travel with a party of 6 monsters, with the ability to specifically choose 3 of them at the start of combat to use, the other 3 becoming reserves that replace fallen monsters or can be swapped in at any time. Each turn, you can choose 1 move from each monster, but the order matters here. In general you want to use status buffing moves, or multi-hit attacks/heals at the start of your turn, then one big final blow at the end of your turn, as each individual action taken boosts the power of subsequent actions by 5%.
In practice this means that there is a genuine strategic choice between whether you want to use the 20 damage pea shooter that hits 6 times, or the massive 140 damage sword slash that only hits once, since if you use the pea shooter first, the sword slash will have a 30% damage boost.
There may seem like not a lot of variety in monsters, there are only 111 of them, but about half way through the game you unlock a further depth to the team strategising by being able to “shift” a monster into a light or dark form, which changes its stats and gives you new options.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/814370 £15.99 (Demo available)
Humble Bundle: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/monster-sanctuary £15.99
Itch.io: https://sersch.itch.io/monster-sanctuary Demo
Switch: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Monster-Sanctuary-1872240.html £15.99
Leave a Reply