Super Monday Night Combat Review: The Wacky World of Sports

The Atlantic recently commented that most games are dumb. The characters of Super Monday Night Combat read that article and took it as a challenge, but in the best possible way. The newly released PC game takes the idea of absurdity, puts it in a weirdness food processor, force feeds it to an awkward unicorn, and poops out solid gold.

Explaining Uber Entertainment’s Super Monday Night Combat is a lot like explaining your first video game experience. I remember telling my mom about Super Mario Brothers. “He’s an Italian plumber, dating an aristocratic princess, who gets captured by a giant dragon/turtle/reptile beast. We call them koopas. Also, you jump on turtles and little hamburger-looking things—goombas.”

But I’m going to explain it anyways: Super Monday Night Combat pits two teams of five pros against each other in a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) format. Instead of click-frenzies like League of Legends and other DOTA clones, SMNC is put in the third person perspective and plays like a shooter with three skills per pro. AI-controlled bots follow designated lanes peppered with turrets and head towards the end goal, called a moneyball. Only bots can bring down the moneyball, at which point you can start doing damage to it until it breaks and your team wins. Simple enough? So far, yes, but that’s just the basics.

Loco Moco Ruins, one of the three current maps. Each arena has a distinct verticality to the design

The wackiness is in the presentation. The game is set up like a futuristic sport (hence the title) and comes complete with commentators, mascots, and a cast of pros so flamboyant they make Chad Ochocinco look humble. Nearly every action in the game is tied to the running commentary delivered by GG Stack and Chip Valvano, who remind me of the pair on Most Extreme Elimination Challenge (which is the best television show ever made not titled Mad Men or Game of Thrones). At first I thought this banter was somewhat annoying, but then I realized that not only did they announce specific events, and I found their corny jokes growing on me, especially since the dialogue avoids repetitiveness.

Like most MOBA-style games, the characters are divided into distinct classes, with each character changing the formula just a little bit. Assassins do a ton of damage and are super mobile, but are the glass cannons of the bunch; tanks can withstand a lot of damage and lock down areas with rapid fire weapons; support can buff characters and cripple opponents, as well as lay down turrets. The 15 currently available pros fall, more or less, into these three categories, although some blur the lines more than others. The Tank, for example, can withstand a good deal of damage, but can only really be effective at close range.

Blech. A menu this deep belongs on a webpage, not a game. And all of it could use some beautifying.

It’s here that some of the game’s imbalances crop up. While I admire SMNC’s efforts to mix things up so pros fill in niches, some of the pros feel a little too powerful. Case in point, the aforementioned Tank: his short-range weaponry makes him pretty much impervious to assassins, who rely on melee weapons to do most of their damage. This would be fine, but then the unit with the supposed best long-range weaponry, the sniper, doesn’t do that great, even with a well-placed head shot. And team composition seems to matter most of all. Even though only one of each pro can be on a team, too many of one class can severely cripple your efforts.

Other that gameplay, my other main issue is the menu. I’m no UI designer, but I feel like I could develop a better system.  The UI is kind of a mess, particularly when you’re navigating it for the first time and have no clue what half the submenus do. There’s a locker room that shows what you have already unlocked, and then there’s the store; those make sense. But then, there are submenus within submenus, and I feel like a lot of this could be streamlined.

But I can forgive most of these grievances. The game is still very new, and in fact, developer Uber Entertainment accidentally launched the game earlier than they had intended. For the most part, Super Monday Night Combat is a fun, insane romp through a land more bizarre than Wonderland and twice as entertaining. Once the balance gets figured out, Super Monday Night Combat will be an amazing game. And since it’s free, there’s no reason not to download it from Steam and check it out for yourself. It’s an indescribable experience.