Remember the SNES version of SimCity, where building and city management were all well and good, but some of the most fun times could come from unleashing natural disasters, nuclear meltdowns, or even a Godzilla-sized Bowser Koopa on your city? Well, imagine what would happen if someone took that joy and gave you the ability to let monsters loose on other people's towns, and to build up defenses for your own.



Bossa's Monstermind does exactly that, by fusing city-building elements common to other social games, a bit of tower defense, and a heaping helping of havoc for you to wreak on your friends' creations. Town fare is a wide, but pretty standard, array of businesses to raise money with which to build, housing for citizens to make everything work, and roads you need to have adjacent to your structures and connected to city hall to keep things functional. Town defenses have their own subsection, which is split between active turrets and missile launchers, and passive defensive such as sandbag barricades and masonry walls. There's also a special items section, for more effective defenses that come with appropriate costs, such as tanks and mines, but that aren't capable of being repaired after being damaged or destroyed.



Finally, there's a huge variety of monsters to choose from, most of which will look familiar to anyone even vaguely familiar with classic monster films of the days of yore. Giant apes, UFOs, and even a giant enemy crab are all at your fingertips, and the second beastie made available to you is a giant-sized version of one very familiar green robot. Being a Dune afficionado, my personal favorite is the giant worm, but there's definitely something in there for everyone.



The game sees fairly regular updates to keep things fresh, with a Halloween reskin that covered your town hall in cobwebs and turned many of the monsters into skeletons or other appropriately spooky alt-versions, and a full-fledged new snowman monster was introduced this past holiday season. Gameplay updates have included the recent addition of the ability to store your structures while you redesign your town, rather than having to scrap them entirely and dole out for an entirely new version, and a few months ago, an update introduced the ability to attack random opponents rather than just your friends list, though it also opens you up to random attack. Not long after that, a somewhat controversial update was implemented to reward those who built towns with a wide variety of money-making structures and put a damper on players who'd just clumped together a bunch of big profit generators by damping the payout from a given structure type after a certain amount of them are built. This drove away some of the higher-level players, who'd scraped their way to massive fortresses of motels and hotels under the old ruleset, including several members of the MASH TacticS fanbase, and ended the tyrannical reign over our ranks by the one and only Pico Mause. Objectively, however, even I have to admit it was a great way to level the playing field and open things up to fresh meat.



Sure, Monstermind's as much of a waste of time as any other social game, but you do have the added benefits of a "harvest" that doesn't disappear while you're away (unless someone trashes your town), and the fact that any destruction, be it inflicted upon you or waged against someone else, will net you experience, which accumulates to unlock new and better structures and monsters. It's at least half a step up from any of Zynga's innumerable 'villes, and it's gotta be more rewarding than The Sims Social, so I highly suggest checking it out.