Steam Power: Super Monday Night Combat

While a lot of my interest lies in the classic, vintage or historical aspects of gaming, I am still a huge fan of the PC and of Steam from Valve.

Valve has been distributing many "free-to-play" titles in recent time and since it's accidental full release in April, i've been addicted to a little game called Super Monday Night Combat. SMNC is in essence a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (or MOBA) game through a Third-Person Shooter perspective. The art style, humor, free-to-play vs pay-to-play aspects and award systems seems like it could have been heavily influenced by Team Fortress 2. They also recently implemented a similar "crate" like award that looks like some kind of Pokeball. Like TF2, you need to purchase keys to unlock the ball and your random loot. Steam trading can be used to get rid of what you don't need for something you could use which is always nice.

I'm not going to get lost in explaining the mechanics and objectives as YouTube reviewer TotalBiscuit (TotalHalibut) has an excellent episode of WTF is...? dedicated to the game.

What I will say, it has kept my attention longer than most MOBA/DOTA games out there. I had a casual experience playing DOTA in Warcraft III, tried LoL and DOTA 2 without continual replay and strangely the only game in the genre I played for a period of time was Petroglyph's Rise of Immortals. Mostly due to it's early induction into Steams Free-to-Play games and that it has an entertaining PvE map I quite enjoyed.

SMNC features hilarious and very helpful commentary from their fictitious broadcasters GG Stack and Chip Valvano and strategic, varied gameplay. It is a breath of fresh air from the overpopulated "realistic military" shooters out there. As an old school gamer, I think the majority of games need to take themselves less serious and pump up games with more camp and humor.

While I feel the characters or Pros are balanced among on a level playing field, Ubernet's matchmaking seems to throw a monkey-wrench in things. When you are level 1-20, you are in one matchmaking pool above that you are in another. I understand why they need to do this right now and that is due to the fact this is a very underplayed game. At most in one regional server, you might see 800-1000 players but that is at peak hours. I think as more people catch on and the game becomes more refined we will see problems like this get worked out. Hopefully they are able to combat player retention in the mean time.

Overall Super Monday Nigh Combat is a personal favorite of mine and I urge you all to check it out. You have nothing to lose... download for free using Steam.