Monday Night Combat

[scienceguy8]

Did a quick Google search, but only found a few passing references to the XBox 360 version.

Fan of class-based shooters like Team Fortress 2? Fan of tower defense games? Then I suggest you give Monday Night Combat a try.

Monday Night Combat is a class-based third person shooter with tower defense elements made and published by up and coming game studio Uber Entertainment. It is available for both the XBox 360 and PC (via the 360's online store and Steam, respectively). In the near future, the world is an overpopulated mess. The worst of consumerism is at the forefront and the world is ruled by a single president who has the power to rig the elections. But really, you don't need to know any of that. You are a clone, genetically tailored for the rigors of Monday Night Combat, the most popular and most lethal spectator sport on the planet. If you die, no biggie, they just build you a new body and pour your brain (or what is left of it) into it. There are two teams, the Hotshots and the Icemen, of up to 6 players each. The playing field contains two spawn points, a number of turret nubs, and two floating spheres known as Money Balls. The object of the game is to destroy your opponent's Money Ball while keeping your team's safe. Money Balls...you know what, I'll just let Monday Night Combat announcer Mickey Cantor explain it.

It's a lot like Team Fortress 2, what with team based combat, similar caricature stylings, and 6 different classes each with their own fleshed-out personality. However, Monday Night Combat feels a lot more hectic. Basically everything you enjoy about TF2 stripped down to its bare minimum. I don't know how to better describe it than that. It is in your best interest to try it out. It is currently only $15 on Steam, and as with everything else on Steam, there will eventually be a sale where you can get it even cheaper.

[Volatar]

The reason you found so little mention of it is because all the discussion of the game has been rolled up into the Gigantic Steam Thread all this time.

[scienceguy8]

Well, that seems stupid. Why not just give each game its own thread? I don't want to go through 27 pages to read about one or two games out of dozens.

[Folytopo]

Indeed the steam thread is an tangled maelstrom of CHHAness.

[Volatar]

The Steam Thread is more of a community thread now. A certain (large) group of people follow it. All the games on Steam are the topic. Separate game threads can and are made, but most of the smaller games just get rolled into the large thread.

An interesting development was the Portal 2 discussion. All the spoilers went into the official thread, while all the non-spoiler discussion went in the Steam thread. The separation worked rather well.

Not telling you to go to the Steam thread, just telling you why you couldn't find anything.

[Gaius Marius]

4 posts in, and only the OP addressed the actual game.

This game interests me and I want to know more..

Talk about Steam in the Steam thread, jeez.

[Feriority]

I love MNC, but (on PC at least; I don't have it for the Xbox) the community seems to be dying. I haven't played since the latest update, and maybe that's helped a lot (new map, woo!), but typically there's only the local official server and maybe one or two that have sane ping I can join; one or two bad players (in the "whines about everything and makes excuses, whether skilled or not" sense, not the "isn't very good at the game and is trying to learn" sense) can mess up the experience pretty badly.

That said, the game itself is excellent; if it had a larger community, I think it'd be one of my favorites. The gameplay can be described as TF2 meets DotA/HoN/LoL, and though the classes and cartoony style make it easy to dismiss as a TF2 clone, the importance of laning and towering, and the value of staying alive to gain money and keep pressure up over getting the kill at the cost of your life make the DotA influence a lot stronger that appears before you play. Once you've got the feel for the game, the ability to make custom classes to change your endorsements (you get three of them in ranked strength, to put towards things like damage, reload speed, ability recharge speed, and health) allow you to build a variant that plays the way you like it for any of the main classes.