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The name Monster Warrior may be a bit misleading. What sounds like a game in which players take on the role of a gallant armored hero struggling in battle against demonic denizens is actually a game where players use their fingers to slice through cute little monsters flying around on the screen. The game has it’s small charms, but generally it is very derivative and lacks some polish that would help it stand up better against similar games.
Monster Warrior works in much the same way as the popular Fruit Ninja game. Monsters randomly fly across the screen and players use their fingers to trace a line on the monsters the screen that will chop them in half. There is a nebulous plot to the game that involves some fluffy bunnies escaping from a witches lair, but it is unclear how this really relates to the gameplay other than having bunnies appear in some of the game modes which players must avoid cutting.
The game has several modes, including a survival mode where players must slice all of the monsters while avoiding bunnies, and a freestyle mode has players slicing as many monsters as they can in a timed game. The gameplay is almost identical to the aforementioned slicing game, but there are some subtle differences. Some of the monsters are lobbed up from the bottom of the screen, while other flying monsters might swoop down from the top of the screen making things a little more interesting.
The visuals in Monster Warrior are passable and they give the game a welcomed whimsical tone. The most disappointing thing about the visuals is the way the monsters split when they are sliced. Other slice and dice games take care to make their models split along the lines traced by the player’s fingers. In Monster Warrior, however, it seems as though the monster models have been pre-split and will always split along the same predetermined lines no matter how they players traced line passes through them.
Monster Warrior isn’t a groundbreaking game by any means. It does justice to the slice and dice style of its genre, but there are a few things it could be doing better to stack up more favorably against the competition. That said, players looking for a spooky slicing game to help them get into the Halloween spirit may like this one.