Review of Monster Island: The Game of Giant Monster Combat

Goto [ Index ]

Monster Island: The Game of Giant Monster Combat

by Firefly Games (www.firefly-games.com)

While entertaining, a poor example of what could have been a great product.

As I mentioned in a earlier review, I have been a Giant Monster fan since I was a child. I would be remiss to mention that I had been looking forward to the release of this book and of its competition, Giant Monster Rampage (GMR)  by Mystic Eye Games. While I have already posted a review for GMR, I will say here that I feel that Monster Island is an inferior product.

I have broken down Monster Island by the categories I felt were most important and rated each separately.

Cost: $9.95 for a 32 page, B&W interior, Full-color cover, staple bound book. This brings the cost per page to roughly $.31; unacceptably expensive. 1 out of 5.

Art: Well drawn, grayscale comic style art; unfortunately, not very much of it. Also contains a full color insert of cardstock Monster figures. 5 out of 5.

Layout: Medium text density with legible fonts. While clean, the general layout is VERY plain; two columns of text with no page decoration. This style harkens back to the day before computer layout programs were available. Not really up to par with the other game publications of the 21^st century.   3 out of 5.

Crunchiness: 3 pages of TOC, intro, & what you need to play; 10 pages of monster creation; 9 pages of rules, optional rules, & scenarios; 8 pages of setting background, pre-constructed monsters, and a monster sheet; & a 1 page ad for the next supplement.
Scattered liberally amongst the sections are quotes from numerous monster movies. At least 67 quotes, in fact, spread over only about 24 pages, each being from 2 to 8 lines long. While I realize that the purpose of these might have been to help get into the feel of the game, it also seems to me that it was used to fill pages. Minus all of the quotes, this book would only be about 27 pages long; that is a lot of filler.
In addition, page three has a quarter column blurb about how Monster Island uses the Action! System™ set of rules. I will address this later. 2 out of 5.

Monster Creation: A generic, point expenditure system is provided to purchase the monsters attributes and powers. I mention generic because that the system seems very similar to a number of generic RPG systems (the most successful being GURPS), many of which are available for no cost. While this will allow anyone to use any of the other Action! System™ games (Not that I have heard of any) in conjunction with Monster Island, I feel the “genericness” of the rules neuters the uniqueness of monster creation. The MAJOR disappointment was the extremely short list of monster powers, only 13!!!. 2 out of 5.

Playability: After going through monster creation, my group and looked over the rules and found nothing unique or thrilling about them. They seemed like a simplified version of most of the generic RPG rules we had seen before; very boring. As a result, we choose not to play. 2 out of 5.

Totals:

Cost:                            1

Art:                              5

Layout:                         3

Crunchiness:                 2

Monster Creation:         2

Playability:                    2

Total:                            2.5

Conclusion: After totaling up the scores I have decided to give a Style of 2 and a Substance of 2. Unfortunately, I feel that the purchase of this game was a waste of money. Anyone looking to play a giant monster table top game using plastic or cardstock monsters would better enjoy Giant Monster Rampage or most any other monster game than Monster Island.