Written by Tim Janson

In Eidos’ Monster Lab, you have the unique opportunity to play a monster-building mad scientist, and I’m talking mad scientist as in the old Universal Horror films style, complete with crazy machines and lighting to spark your monster to life.  Monster Lab combines elements of both RPG and action games as you build your own monster to do battle in various landscapes but also have various quests to complete along the way. 

You’ll start out as apprentice to Prof. Fuseless and he will instruct you on the basics of making a monster.  Monsters can be composed of three distinct types of parts: mechanical, biological, and alchemical.  Your monster can be a mix of any of these types but to start, you only have access to the mechanical control room.  Monsters are composed of four different body parts: head, torso, arms, and legs.  Consequently, within the various workshops there are four machines that will build each type of part.  You’re given a few spare parts to get started with your first monster but from there you are on your own.  You’ll have to find parts to build a better monster.  How do you do that?  Three ways…first you’ll be given various quests and assignments to complete.  Complete them and you will get more parts.  Second, each map you explore has various mini-games you can play.  Winning those gives you parts.  Finally, battling and defeating rival monsters will give you parts as well.  More about monster battles in a moment.

Once you have new parts you head to the workshop and choose what type of part you want to build.  You choose a main and secondary ingredient to mix.  A meter will give you the difficulty rating of the part you are trying to build.  Each machine is itself another mini-game.  The better you perform the game, the higher quality of the item that you build.  The goal is to get to 100% quality.  The higher the difficulty of the part rating, the harder the mini-games are.  However, how you do at the mini-games is not the only aspect that affects the quality of your item.  The recipe you used is also important.  Different items can be used to build the same type of head for example.  However, if you get the recipe just right, your item can gain special abilities such as having greater speed, accuracy, toughness, or add electrical, explosive, or radioactive effects to your attack.  Likewise mixing the wrong ingredients can result in item defects like being weak or slow.  Fortunately, icons will alert you to bonus or defects and you can feel free to discard any bad items.

In the beginning, you will have just one map that you have access to.  As you complete all the quests, more maps will open up.  You will also gain access to the biological and alchemical workshops and their instructors so you can now build a monster with a combination of part types.  This is one of the great features of Monster Lab; the combinations of part types are seemingly endless.  The combinations have to be in the thousands!  Here’s a tip, when building parts, practice the mini-game with ingredients you have in abundance until you get skillful in the game,  Then use higher quality items for more difficult part ratings to insure you make the best quality parts.

As mentioned, you will spend a great deal of time battling other monsters.  Each item you make will have different attack types such as punches, kicks, mortars, cannons, lasers, chemical attacks, and more.  Each part is rated for the amount of energy it takes to use, and the number of hitpoints it has.  In battle, you use the nunchuk controller to point to one of your parts to choose an attack type.  You can have two different types of arms.  I like to have one that does a physical attack and one that has a ranged weapon attack like a mortar.  When you point to an attack, a part on your opponent will be highlighted.  This shows you where your attack will be targeted.  Monsters can fight on after losing heads, arms, and legs so try to target the torso.  Once the torso is destroyed the monster is too!

This is all great fun but it’s not without its problems.  Monster Lab does fall into a routine repetitiveness pretty quickly.  Essentially you complete quests, fight monsters, and build monster parts.  The worlds are different, the monsters are different, but the game play is all the same.  You’ll find yourself endlessly building parts and discarding them due to defects or low quality.  Another frustration with the game is the controls.  Some of the mini-games can be downright frustrating to play due to confusing control movements.  I spent a couple of hours trying to beat one challenge because the instructions on what to do were mystifying.

Graphically Monster Lab take the cartoon approach.  It’s tongue-in-cheek and often quite humorous.  There are fantastic cinematic sequences as well and voice acting is also superb from Fuseless’s heavy German accent to the Italian accent of the Alchemical master.  It’s a very nice game to look at and listen to but its downfall are the repetitive gameplay and difficult controls.

Game Rating B minus