Monster Crown

Monster Crown is a decent game that falls short of greatness in a few areas. Legitimately cool ideas with breeding and an overall solid combat system are let down by lackluster monster designs and performance issues. Then there's the elephant in the room, which is that Monster Crown ultimately feels like a jankier and less addictive version of the oldest Pokémon games. We'd still give this one a recommendation, as the bones of the experience are good enough that its worth a punt for big Pokémon fans pining for the 8-bit days, but you might want to wait for a sale with this one.

Monster Crown has potential and some good ideas, but execution is lacking.

Monster Crown is a game that I would say try out if you’re into the old school Pokémon games. This is obviously a primitive game, but offers some new things to the monster catching genre. It’s most certainly not the best game or even the most flashy game out there, but as a Pokémon style game grounded in a more traditional turn-based RPG, it’s not a bad ride.

‎I could say that I played a kind of Pokémon on my Xbox Series S, but the truth is that beyond the initial premise from which the formula extracts, Monster Crown is not a clone, it is a tribute designed for a different audience, or for those who already spent the entire saga of Ash and Pikachu and want to look for something different but with the same DNA. ‎

Monster Crown is more than just a copy of Pokémon. It is a game with a lot of personality, mainly due to its reproduction mechanics and its many charismatic monsters. However, its gameplay becomes tiresome due to its difficult to navigate menus and unintuitive combat. The map, although large, does not encourage exploration and makes things uninteresting. All in all, it's a worthwhile experience for Pokémon fans and, with future updates, it has everything to improve and become a remarkable title.

There were a lot of enjoyable, nostalgic moments with the familiar battle systems that were strengthened by the retro aesthetics. Monster Crown is more than just capturing and leveling up the monsters you tame. There is a story to be followed and monsters to breed. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to comprehend, and janky controls take away from the experience, but the general gameplay is familiar and straightforward to understand. With so much information and planning involved, though, Monster Crown feels like it can be a bigger game than it actually is, and perhaps one day, it can be released as something more ready and easier to learn.

At the end of the day, Monster Crown has very little going for it aside from that brief rush of nostalgia. The interesting mechanics are buried behind a poorly balanced combat system, a ridiculous story, and a mountain of glitches. There are some interesting ideas, but it's difficult to recommend the title based solely on that potential. It's a game that feels like knockoff Pokémon that you can play on the same system as the real Pokémon offerings, not to mention all of the other competitors. There are patches coming that will hopefully alleviate some of these issues, but until they do, there are much better monster trainer games out there.

Overall, Monster Crown has a good premise behind it. It has a solid base and if the developers decided to make another monster collector down the road, they have a good sense of what to include. The combat is fun and the breeding aspect can make it interesting to see what monsters you can end up creating, especially if you’re into min-maxing. In this aspect, I do believe that they have really touched on what made games like Pokemon popular: the excitement of catching them all and figuring out how to best build your team to be the strongest they can be. However, the bugs and some of the progression decisions made with Monster Crown make it a tedious experience at best and a downright frustrating one at worse. The storytelling leaves me feeling as though I was always missing some details. And the jumps in levels for boss monsters were frustrating to come across, perhaps more so because they could be cheesed by getting lucky with a pact. Overall, Monster Crown is an experience that may be better played on other systems that aren’t the Switch and for those who don’t mind the inconsistencies present.

A dull comparison to the legendary monster-catching games of yore that we know and love, Monster Crown fails to catch ’em all.

This is a game that could be fun if it worked properly on Nintendo Switch. If we leave this aside, we are facing a totally enjoyable title, especially for fans of this kind of games.