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Monsters and Monocles is a send-up to the days of quarter-guzzling afternoons spent at the arcade. It’s a top-down shooter full of Victorian dandies and steampunk aesthetics that encourages solo play as much as it welcomes cooperative and chaotic multiplayer sessions.
It also features a dog who has a better wardrobe than anyone I’ve ever met. But that’s neither here nor there.
Over the last few days, I’ve been raiding desert tombs and shooting my way through mansion corridors infested with the undead. I’ve fired weapons powered by tea and uncovered relics that give me an extra edge in battle. My time with Monsters and Monocles has been frantic and exciting, but it’s also left me wanting a bit more.
The core of the game doesn’t feel too different from any other top-down shooter. As much Smash TV as it is Nuclear Throne, it revolves around blasting through legions of enemies with an arsenal of over-the-top weapons.
Monsters and Monocles’ main draw is its dedication to creating a charming steampunk world through impressive pixel art. Characters like Baron Von Dogface and the top-hat-wearing Rupert Killingsworth speak to a lighthearted take on the alternative-history sensibilities of steampunk fiction. The characters fit naturally within the world of airships and manors that players spend their time exploring.
Every character, weapon, and monster looks great, even when battles reach a pitched frenzy. Monsters and Monocles doesn’t shy away from throwing huge numbers of foes at you, making every one of its randomized rooms a potentially dangerous experience. It’s hectic, but in the kind of enjoyable way that only a top-down shooter can provide.
Throughout my time with Monsters and Monocles, I was impressed by its attempts to keep things varied as much as often as I was let down by some of its systems. Currently, it has three environments for players to tackle. Each one is complete with two playable levels, an item “shoppe,” and a boss floor. Instead of dropping players into an environment and leaving them to their own devices, the game tasks players with specific requirements to advance through each stage.
For example, sometimes you will have to kill a certain number of powered-up baddies. Other times, you’ll have to find a special gun that fires keys and use it on a locked door. These objectives go a long way towards spicing things up and encouraging players to do more than just zone into a map, kill everything, and then leave without ever batting an eye.
Similarly, Monsters and Monocles requires players in cooperative groups to pay close attention to how they interact with one another. Every party member shares a single pool of lives, which encourages players to be alert of their teammate’s positioning and current health. When reviving a downed teammate means ostensibly losing one of your own lives, every decision matters if you want to make it to the final boss.
These conventions, as well as the striking art direction, help the game forge its own identity from the bedrock of arcade-like shooters, but they don’t help alleviate the problems that currently hold it back.
At the moment, Monsters and Monocles is bogged down by clunky gameplay and a series of minor annoyances. Chief among them are an unresponsive targeting reticule and nonexistent player feedback when taking damage. This combination makes most shootouts feel especially cumbersome. Unlike, say, the pinpoint precision of Nuclear Throne’s targeting, Monsters and Monocles feels sluggish. This leads to the all-too-frequent situation of being flanked by an enemy without having the ability to efficiently take them out quickly. Similarly, the lack of damage feedback means that death can come without real warning. Even if it was completely fair, it often feels cheap.
And speaking of fair, not all of the weapons are created equally. While you start with a dinky handgun, there are over twenty different guns to find and master. However, a small portion of them are actually viable in single-player sessions. It didn’t take long for me to learn that all I had to do to conquer seemingly insurmountable odds was find a gun that fired a three-bullet-burst spread and keep shooting. Monsters and Monocles has a tiered system that allows guns to power up with frequent kills, which turned my weapon into a dandy of death that left me unstoppable more often than not.
Of course, these kinds of problems can easily be fixed as the game continues to be iterated upon in Steam Early Access. With a bit more variety and some reworked systems, Monsters and Monocles has the potential to become the kind of game that friends can pick up and play together, giddy with goofy, steam-powered guns and plenty of enemies to kill.
