Managing monsters feels like a job, and I like to leave the office at 5.
The premise behind MachiaVillain, the Kickstarter-funded new game from Wild Factor, is of an evil genius building up an evil mansion filled with evil monsters to do evil things. It’s a cross between the city-building of SimCity and the resource procuration of Warcraft, with some tower defense thrown in. Though this should be a smart, interesting concept, it’s unfortunately bogged down by an exceedingly over-encumbered menu system and little annoyances throughout.
In the game, we spawn and control a variety of monsters — some of which are licensed and others public domain — as we grab resources to build a mansion. In other similar games, building structures results in identical designs, but MachiaVillain gives us a lot more freedom to create the mansions how we want. All that freedom also requires a lot of minute detail management: we can’t just build areas, we need to build floors AND walls AND place furniture AND select tools AND decide which monster to do it AND sure we unselect their current task AND make sure the other monsters are either helping or unselected AND, AND, AND. It’s a long process just to do one thing, and it comes off as frustrating.
Just to get our monster to do one thing feels like managing a baseball team’s roster via spreadsheet, checking and unchecking different boxes until it’s just right (or right enough) to complete the task. It’s even more complex when events occur. When police officers show up to investigate, our monsters need to be pulled back from what they are doing first, then rearranged to protect the home — even though we have traps set up.
The complexity is even more regrettable once we realize how charming the game could actually be. The character designs are cute, adding a cartoon-like personality to the monsters and people in the game. The bright, punchy visuals are a good contrast to the otherwise dark nature of creating a torture house. The audio adds to that as well, producing almost adorable little sounds when the monsters do different things.
But oh boy does it take a long time to do those things. It’s understood that sim-type games require planning, but MachiaVillain would do wise to simplify a whole lot of it.
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