Monster Crown

I played this years ago and stopped because all of the bugs made it an incredibly frustrating experience; figured I'd just wait a while so that the game could be polished more. I just tried it again, and not only are all the bugs still there, but there are somehow more. It's a real shame that it's too late to refund this. It's hard to be interested in the sequel when I can't even play through the prequel. Not to mention: if this is how they "care" for their first game, I don't have high hopes for any future releases.

Would be a good game if you got rid of all the bugs and annoying features but they probably aren't going to update this due to the sequel

Gameplay is actually really good but to many bugs, some game breaking

If this were a hobby project for one or two people, that would be fine. But they made a kickstarter and squandered $50,000 on this and that's unacceptable. From not delivering on stretch goal promises to not fixing bugs/causing more bugs to appear, this entire project from top to bottom was a mess. It really is tough to believe in their second project when this one was abandoned and they just ran with the initial investment money like they did. They even had the gall to create a new kickstarter for their second game.

Ok so to preface, this game has a lot of problems. I mean it is very unpolished piece of work. Its personally one of the best games I've ever played though. I got some 30 hours into the game and beat the main quest line and the second Island's three kings too. I made a fun team of slimy beasts. As far as a creature collector goes this is amazing, the breeding system is fun to figure out but I think it could be more challenging to get the right breeds somehow. Using the gene lab almost made it too easy but it still had a learning curve. There was a couple of times that I got softlocked, but I figured out that I could use the number 9 to return to the farm just in case. The constant saving mechanic was frustrating sometimes. I remember that I spent an hour or so levelling my monsters up and ended up losing that progress somehow. Frustrating. Otherwise for fans of the monster taming genre I think there is a monster for you in this game. I can't wait for the second game and hope that the level of polish is that much better :)

It feels really bad to play and unfinished. The store page is misleading and the UI in-game looks much worse. Party sprites don't even load so there's no way of knowing which monsters are equipped. The arrow in the menu screen doesn't match up with what you select e.g. your arrow points to "sit" but you bind "ride" instead. There's overlapping text, wonky movement, monster typing isn't clear so you just guess half the time. If you try and quit the game, then cancel, the game soft-locks and you're forced to ALT+F4. Get Coromon instead it's a much better game. --- Edit - After trying the game on my PC (instead of Steam Deck), the monster sprites are now magically showing up. So it's an issue with playing the game on Deck.

Nothing like a game so bad I can start the review before beating it. And oh brother, Monster Crown is bad, barely reaching the level of a gen 1 Pokemon romhack and struggling for beta if not alpha functionality. MC is a throwback, a 16-bit 2D game trying to look 8-bit with catchy if simplistic music, a strange little world to explore and a deeper than it seems system of gathering dozens of fun little monsters to dog fight with. MC needs to be legally distinct so monsters seek strength and agree to pacts(pokeballs) to serve humans, gyms are chiefs, the pokecenter charges you, that kinda thing. It's a modern but medieval world absent any authority past your own monster gang but kings still rule and gangsters(two separate groups) run around as 1920s mobster pastiches. It's got that sub-$10 indie soul I appreciate in a flawed but admirable title. MC will be shedding the word admirable very soon. It's not bad at first, just a little weird and I can respect that somebody took a crack at the good ol' monster battler formula. What I can't respect is how unpleasant it is to play. Things start off dodgy but forgivable. Clunky UI, constant sound errors, busted scaling in buildings, poor dialogue boxing that's easy to skip lines in. Is it still fun, can we get past a little cruft? Once that cruft spills over into the actual monster fighting I'd say no, no we can't. MC is a Pokemon clone but I'm not going to hold a 30 year series with 10+ entries against Studio Aurum. What I am going to hold against MC is that it's buggy, easy to soft/hardlock, and even the most basic elements of the battling don't work. I've been lucky enough to dodge story progression getting locked at least, though other reviews document constant incidents. The bugs are wild. Monster knocks you to 1 HP, where the bar hovers for several seconds, before dropping to 0 and killing you? Eh, I guess this(2 digit) HP bar is using decimals and rounding it can't display. OK, how about swapping my monsters to build synergy and not getting any? That's rough, it's all the game offers to try and improve on the combat formula. Alas, my tactics don't matter much when I can KO an enemy and their corpse attacks me on the way out or they'll take a double turn on swap in, or they'll swap and that'll confuse the game and remove one of my turns so the enemy gets another double turn, but that's OK, when one of my mons die I can often select and have their corpse launch an attack anyway. That's some alpha build nonsense. I laughed at entering a fight where a boss monster would guard and build synergy for big attacks... and he never attacked! Brilliant! Glad I was warned about his gimmick that doesn't function. Maybe that's related to overall bad AI where if an enemy has a buff move they can get stuck casting it infinitely, which is extra funny since they don't stack. Nautlus cast belly drum eight times in a row? Thanks for the win! Jank is everywhere. Everything feels a little jarring, like all the buffer windows between accepting inputs or playing animations are off. How cutscenes hang long enough to make you worry they won't advance. How there's little polish and the game is irritating to play, like every single "effective/not effective" message in combat being an unskippable two seconds. Whatever MC is doing with Unity it is not doing it well and the devs are on record as not caring about doing further bug fix or quality patches. If we're saints and ignore the jank then the systems are still dull and imbalanced, including tutorials that are missable or don't exist. MC has some genuinely good ideas like overworld functionality but doesn't seem to know how to explain or balance it but offers it to you from moment one anyway. Instant kill fireballs? Rideable monsters that auto-KO weak monsters on contact? Odd pacing that. Scouting seems to check monster strength reliably but fireball and riding don't and grant exp for these instant kills. More bugs? An alternative to grinding? I'm all for avoiding mindless tedious grinding but this undermines the exploration and resource management in already one-dimensional dungeons. There's a huge roster and loads of moves but almost all of them are 100% accuracy, infinite use and small deviations in power with the occasional so small it's pointless boost. +1 attack over my last move? Wow. Waste a turn to boost attack less than synergy? Brilliant. +10% defense, non-stacking? On monsters with 20-40 HP? Maybe that's bugged. Who can tell with MC? But that's alright, monsters also have shallow movepools when looked at individually, often going dry quickly. With the flattened type matching(only 5 types) and uniform stat growths for most mons there's not much team planning. You know, in my monster collecting and team building game. Get bigger number, have 1+ of each type. The final nail in the coffin is the story taking a comical nosedive after introducing the villains. OK, the stupid thugs and gangsters are so pathetic they're funny. Each little tamer chief has a goofy story/personality but the first guy is an absurdly cruel parody of a greedy miser and is lynched and murdered by monsters after the fight. Hmm. Everybody that isn't a town filler NPC is a little too jaded, dialogue often spills over with misplaced gravitas. Uh oh. That's right, MC is a DARK setting, which means it's written at the level of a bad romhack. This ain't your daddy's monster collectin' world! When Evil lady one-shots your entire baby party with a level 65 godmon and then rages while her monster fillets you with claws literally bigger than a person... oh man. Bad JRPG writing too, what a feast. Don't worry, you'll get at least three more forced losses. Ya know, Pokemon doesn't try that hard but it knows the basics and does them well enough to make it look easy. Giovanni doesn't threaten your life on Route 2 because the author has watched too much bad shounen anime. The darker stuff makes most of the game being a kid-friendly world stand out awkwardly. I finished MC to see how low it'd go and the answer was subterranean. Systems tease me to engage and take the battling seriously, to draft a team for all comers with varied types and a wide monster fusion system(but not a deep one due to the lackluster movesets and combat, it's stat-sticks all the way down.) But... why? In a game where I can't be sure the very rounds of the turn-based combat will work and I might brick my save file at any moment, why would I play MC outside of my compulsive personality defects? The awful story? A brighter future awaits you, dear reader, if you play anything else. Emulate older Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, DemiKids games, buy a recent one, take a blind shot at any other monster collector on Steam. Palworld, Monster Hunter Stories, Coromon. Your time has more value than anything MC can offer.

This game is clearly not finished, for even the first 30 minutes of the game are an utter mess and I am not just talking about the bugs, as everything involving the gameplay has been messed up too.

On the routes, monsters just sort of constantly spawn in your vicinity and run right for you. I imagine they wanted to avoid the random encounter style of pokemon, but came up with something way worse. After being bombarded by non-random encounters along the path to town, you then find that the not-Pokemon Center isn't free. I did not find any source of extra money on the road, so I cannot speak to how realistic it is to heal your monsters with any regularity. Battles are slow; I didn't see any battle speed settings. Hope you enjoy "Advantageous Attribute!" being displayed for two seconds every single attack. The one saving grace is that it doesn't appear that losing results in Game Over, so it arguably isn't that unforgiving, it's just not fun.