#mcrant

Monster Strike is a physics-based action RPG where up to four players can cooperatively fight against monsters of all kinds in an  enclosed arena where your monsters can bounce around the field smacking into enemies, and allies alike to your benefit, as a race to see whether your enemies’ HP or yours gets lowered to 0 first.  Throughout your time playing, you’ll earn rewards for completing certain mission objectives, rank up to increase your stamina meter, and eventually get to perform in more and more difficult quests. the overall gameplay is a bit reminiscent of 8-pin billiards or pinball... if the bumpers were supposed to break.  And shoot out lasers and bombs at your monsters.  But your monsters aren’t completely helpless against these attacks.

A lot of the game is pretty standard monster collection fare, becase why mess with what works?  Fuse monsters together to level up the base monster, and collect different monsters to go against different enemies.  Each monster has different sling styles (whether a monster bounces off enemies or they pierce through them to hit weak points for extra damage), different types and elemental attributes that are mostly straightforward for what hurts which element more (fire burns wood, wood drinks water, water douses fire, and light and dark hate each other), and abilities that have a great variety of effects, such as nullifying obstacles, doing a larger amount of damage to certain types of enemies and obstructions, and even curing status problems and healing your HP.  And if you have multiple copies of monsters, you can fuse them together to increase their Luck.  If the first monsters in your team has high enough luck, it can drastically increase the chance of bonus items appearing as rewards for completing quests.

Another ability monsters on your team have are bump combos.  These are the abilities that cause explosions, lasers, enemy-seeking missiles, crashing meteors, and even more rare abilities like a speed- or defense-boost,  a spread-shot shotgun blast, or a damaging laser that connects between the combo-monster and the currently shot monster that does constant damage to anything in the laser... as long as the first monster is moving.  And finally, there’s the Strike Shot.  The Strike Shot is an ability that takes a set amount of turns to charge, but when it finishes, you can activate it by tapping the monster’s profile pic when it’s that monster’s turn.  When you fire an activated monster, the strike shot also activates, doing even MORE different things, like increasing speed and power, revealing enemy weak points, doing more damage when it hits weak points, and even leading all of your other monsters to attack at the same time.

Plus, while most smartphone games have monster-evolution mechanics, the ones in Monster Strike vary a bit more.  Throughout play, you’ll collect items called sharls and stoans.  collecting enough of these will allow you to spend them to evolve monsters into higher ranks if they are able to get stronger.  rarer sharls help to evolve monsters into even more powerful forms, and some can even change forms by using different monsters.  With so much variety in the monster abilities, you may think you won’t see all of these abilities in action, but the game gives you more than enough quests to experience all of them at LEAST once.

The Quests are separated into four types: the Trial Quests, the Event Quests, the Voucher Quests, and the Temple Quests.  Event Quests are the bread-and-butter of the game, where most of the monsters you’ll get are found.  Well, I say “get” but I MEAN “Earn,” as there are often times when completing a quest that you’ll get a copy of the main enemy you defeat.  Voucher Quests are a little less straightforward: once in a while, certain monsters and mission rewards will net you vouchers, good for entering a unique type of quest one time.  Trial Quests are there to get you acclimated to the types of hazards that you will see in the game, and are a good place to practice and net EXP to increase your player rank.  Higher rank means more stamina, more stamina means more quests and eventually taking on harder difficulty quests... and when you rank up to Rank 50, you can take on Temple Quests.

Temple quests are interesting in a whole different way.  Temple Quests being unlocked instantly gives certain monsters a Bade of Honor, which means they can get an additional ability by eating an Ableberry, which you earn from the Temple Quests.  Ableberries can increase your HP, attack power, or speed; make your bump combos do more damage or heal your HP for certain amounts once per turn; and some even do instant amounts of damage to boss monsters each starting round you fight against one.

There is a LOT of strategy that can be applied in the game for preparing to go against a certain monster: should I use a monster who is elementally stronger, or should I use a monster of the same element, but will do more damage because my opponent is a Samurai?  Even if you don’t think you have quite the right monsters for a boss, you can eventually take it down with sheer determination and strategic use of your current monsters’ abilities.  If you don’t want to spend money to get better monsters, that’s completely fine, because one of the best parts is many of the more powerful monsters can be earned through combat.  But be careful: the difficulty of the quests isn’t called Impossible for nothing.  They may not TECHNICALLY be impossible, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, they may as well be impossible.  

But eventually, you may hit a road block: the monsters you have are okay, but not quite enough for those Impossible level quests.  That’s that the hatchers are for.  In Monster Strike, hatchers are the part of the game that lets you get other monsters in exchange for the in-game premium currency of orbs (the regular hatcher), and friend-points (the friend hatcher).  One hundred friend points or five orbs lets you use each version of hatcher once, respectively.  But if you have enough orbs, you can even do a Golden Ten-shot, guaranteeing all ten monsters are four-star or higher monsters.  Different hatchers even increase the chances of getting certain monsters, and some monsters are exclusive to specific orb hatchers.  I suppose you COULD buy the orbs with real money, but you would be surprised how incredibly easy it is to get orbs if you try hard enough:  Complete a set of Trail Quest levels?  Five orbs.  Co-op play with a new person?  Five orbs, twenty if it’s your first.  Share a friend code with someone who also plays so you can both play together and get daily co-op bonuses (which can potentially net you another orb)?  Five orbs.  This game loves to spoil its players.

With over 1300 monsters currently in the US version of the game (including region exclusives like Sir Lucas and Tempest), it’s very likely that you’ll get at least one or two five-star ranked monsters from any of the easy ways to earn orbs, and when starting out, you automatically get a four- or five-star monster from a set of starting monsters.  Plus, as of this article’s publication date, you can get a guarenteed 5-star monster from a single-use hatcher.  And the best part is that it also includes a few of the most desired hatcher-exclusive monsters. But you better hurry before it’s removed on April 11th at 4 PM EST.