Monday Night Combat

I’m going off to a far away land tomorrow. I had hoped by now I’d be finished with Alan Wake but I can’t trudge through it fast enough so that review will have to come at another time :]

Instead I’m going to talk about how effing badass Monday Night Combat is. It’s been out on XBLA for a while now and was just recently released for Steam. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, think Team Fortress 2 but a lot more fun and not as “hardcore”.

There’s a red team (the Hotshots), a blue team (the Icemen), and Bullseye the mascot.


Hit him up for monies, but do not try to take him out with a special move (unless you have a death wish).

Each team has a “Moneyball”. The goal is to take down the other team’s Moneyball by getting your robots into their base.


I personally like to refer to the Bouncers as “gorilla fuckfaces”

Your team’s robots spawn normally from an enclosed area in your base, unless the following happen:
1. It’s OVERTIME, and then both teams start spawning crazy shit like multiple Jackbots
2. You or your teammates manually spawn robots (for a cost -- $100)
3. Your Moneyball is down, and your robots spawn weaker

You want to avoid option #3 as much as possible, obviously. So how is this done?

Let’s start from the beginning. When starting a Crossfire match (playing against others online), you have a choice of 6 classes.


I prefer the assassin – she’s hot, quick, and fun to play (just like your mom!)

Gunners are the Tanks – they’re super powerful and have lots of health, but are very slow moving and huge so they make for easy targets. Tanks are also the…Tanks…but with fire. To be entirely honest, I confuse these two classes all the time and generally call the Gunners “Tanks” and the Tanks “Turtles”. The most important thing is that they’re both strong and can kick a ton of ass.

Assaults (or “Mr Perfect” as my friend likes to call them) are literally a class crafted by the gods – they have it all. You want firepower? You got it. You want to be able to move quickly and fly to avoid nearly any type of attack? No problem. If you basically want to look good while putting forth very little effort, you want to play Assault. Now if you want to be an asshole (or “Child Rapist” as that same friend calls them), you want Snipers. Snipers don’t actually do much real work in the game – their sole existence is to piss everyone else off enough to rage quit. However if you get good enough as a Sniper, you can actually tilt an entire game in your favor. But you have to be willing to live with the fact that you rape children for a living. ;]

Supports are the backbone of the game. They’re like the engineers of the board – they can hack into turrets, create their own turret anywhere on the board that heals (a “Firebase”), and spawn cooler bots than any other class. Oh, and they also heal everyone’s asses. They’re my other favorite class, second to Assassins. Assassins cloak and sneak around to surprise players with a huge knife in their head. They’re also really good at taking out the biggest bot – Jackbot XL.

Now that I’ve given you a rundown of the classes, let me describe those turret things I mentioned earlier. The thing that differentiates MNC from other lethal sports of the future are the turrets and robots. Robot’s jobs are simple – they spawn and attack anything in their path to the other team’s Moneyball. If there’s nothing in their path, they start attacking the ball and it drops (lawl). The only things in their path would be players, other robots, or turrets. All of the maps start each team out with a few turrets on each side of the Moneyball, however it is up to the rest of the team to build up the turrets in the base.


This is what happens when you fail to build and upgrade turrets

There are four different kinds of turrets, and honestly I have no idea what each of them does. I know one of them is for killing, one for slowing…and two more for killing? In my opinion, it’s best to leave the turret building to more experienced players (especially Supports as they’re the only ones who can hack and heal turrets) and focus on the upgrading.

You can upgrade the turrets in your base by getting money. You get money from hitting Bullseye, assisting with a kill, destroying robots and turrets, or just plain killing another player. In addition to upgrading turrets you use money to upgrade your skills (each class has 4 skills with three levels each), using the Annihilator, and buying juice.


She's drinking Spunky Cola…but you get the idea

Juice is what happens when you hit players/bots/the Moneyball enough times to build up that little pink bar at the bottom of the screen. Or alternatively, you can buy Juice for the low low price of $500! When you’re juiced, you regain all lost health, become Hulk-like, and smack the crap out of anything around you. It’s a good opportunity to take out most of the turrets in the other team’s base or just be a plain asshole and kill everyone.

The Annihilator is an extremely useful weapon on every map that can only be used once every 3 minutes or so. It’s generally in the dead center of the map and hard to get to – usually requires Mr Perfect’s jetpack or an activated launch pad. And it’s $250. But it is so worth it – it destroys every enemy bot on the screen (except for Jackbots) and damages players on the opposite team. Take it before anyone else does!

My Starbucks buzz is wearing off, so this ends my MNC explanation (reminder to self: never write after drinking 20 ounces of sugary fake coffee product).

My 360 is pretty much now an exclusive MNC playing machine, so if anyone here wants to play sometime shoot me a PM!