Monsters and Monocles, a new co-op top down shooter enters Early Access, some early thoughts

Come in, have a cup of tea to replenish that mind and let me tell you about Monsters and Monocles a stylish new co-op shooter that’s now available for Linux.

After a little woops by the PR team handling the keys to Monsters and Monocles, I finally have a key to try it out and tell you what I think.

Disclosure: Key provided by PR team.

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It feels very similar to Enter the Gungeon both in style and gameplay. Although it actually feels faster paced due to the movement and enemy types. I’m actually enjoying this one a fair bit more.

The graphics are really lush, with their vibrant colours and sweet retro inspired design. It’s an extremely stylish game, so Retro Dreamer (the developer) has done well here.

The weapons feel like they have a bit of oomph to them too, the scattergun being the first extra weapon that I found was awesome. It has a meaty sound to it, each shot pushes you back a bit and it will overheat in the middle of battle making the game feel rather frantic. The grenade launcher is especially over the top, with a massive explosion and it’s simply awesome. There’s something incredibly fun about running into a room of walking bombs and firing my grenade launcher in a circle around me.

The character designs are fantastic too. Big ol’ slimes that fire out smaller slimes at you, walking eyes that shoot some sort of sticky web to slow you down, once killed they will spawn a bunch of baby walking eyes. It has a real freaky design to it and it’s awesome.


It’s also quite charming and funny, as picking up a cup of tea gave me a health boost. As a “brit”, that amused me more than it probably should have.

Issues
First thing for people with multiple monitors: It starts on the wrong screen, but you can move it over after setting it to windowed mode and then putting it back into fullscreen.

One thing that has bugged me a little bit, is the enemy AI needs some better pathfinding. I’ve seen them repeatedly get stuck on object, especially the bigger enemies. I feel that will need addressing soon.

Using the in-game ESC menu, I seem to be unable to access the Controls button. Clicking it gives feedback show it’s pressed, but nothing happens.

It also displays gamepad prompts even when I am not using one, I assume this is because it picks up my Steam Controller dongle as a controller even without it turned on.

It seems the developer is already on it for these issues too:

@gamingonlinux Thanks for checking it out! Happily most of the issues are known, working on them as fast as one coder can. :)

— Ryan Evans (@rje) August 18, 2016

Overall it is one I can easily recommend checking out even at this early stage. After a long day walking a four year old around a park, playing football and generally running around, killing some well designed beasts is exactly what I needed.

It has all the makings to easily become one of the best top down shooters available for Linux. I shall be keeping a keen eye on this one for certain.

Also, here’s some Day 1 sales stats for you:

Day 1 platform breakdown for Monsters & Monocles:

Windows: 91.11%
Mac: 7.93%
Linux: 0.96%

— Ryan Evans (@rje) August 17, 2016

Sad to see Linux so low, but this is in-line with expectations given our current market-share on Steam which is pretty accurate really.

Final note: I have a key ready to do some co-op testing with, so thoughts on that part will come later.

You can find Monsters and Monocles on Steam right now.