Monster Dash Review

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Put simply, Monster Dash is Canabalt with guns (or as Accidental put it; Canabalt meets Metal Slug. He’s also got an annoying top score too, 4920 vs. my 3848!). Monster Dash is made by Halfbrick Studios, its first iPhone game being Fruit Ninja, which also proved quite popular.

You have two buttons; one to jump and one for guns. Each side of the screen is given to these buttons. And the great thing about it is there’s no horrible d-pad controls. Your hero (called Barry Steakfries — but I prefer he remain nameless) runs along automagically from left to right. The buttons also disappear completely after several taps which is a nice touch.

Your goal is to jump those gaps, spikes, and monsters. Weapons include the default shotgun, and ones you pick up along the way such as a submachine gun, machine gun jetpack and electric shocker called Mr. Zappy. You have 3 hearts like in old school platformers which help you when you run into things. But falling still means insta-death.

There’s also little things to slow you down, just like Canabalt when your strides get a little too brisk. Something that’s not like Canabalt are the locations. Every 1000 points the setting changes to a new theme; Zombie Metropolis, Vampire Kingdom, Tomb Town or Demon Dynasty. The background changes, as well as a new variation on the music. The monsters are new too. You’re no longer jumping on mummies in Egypt, but cute little zombies in Transylvania.

Unfortunately the hero’s witty speech bubbles at the end of each run aren’t as great as the interesting fruit facts in Fruit Ninja.

However, the Open Feint leaderboards, statistics and all the rest make up for this slight error in judgment. There’s some great achievements in there too if you get bored of simply going for the longest distance. These are more than just the Open Feint achievements and there’s a lot of them too. The only problem is that some of them are a little hard to decipher. What does Spirited Away or Smokey Head mean? Plus many of them simply use question marks as placeholders.

Closing Comments
For $1.29, Monster Dash gives incredible value, and I feel that Halfbrick may have priced it too low. Just like Canabalt it’s super easy to get into and so much fun. An insta-buy if I ever saw one.

Download Monster Dash here for iPhone/iPod Touch (no iPad?).

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