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Backyard Monsters

April 21st, 2010

In recent months I have increasingly watched as facebook gaming becomes more and more sophisticated while maintaining it’s ‘casual’ and welcoming roots.  I’ve been highly impressed by the direction these games are going in, and while I’ve always seen this as a great new market I’m now also convinced that these can even become more a part of the core gamer market too.

The game most recently impressing me is the relatively new Backyard Monsters.  Like The Casual Collective’s previous facebook game Desktop Defender, the title has been designed with facebook’s unique feature set in mind.  Things such as status updates, friend invites and encouraging return visits – they’re all here and implemented with care and consideration of the user – these are things I don’t really need to cover as we’re all aware of how these things work.  Just know that here they work very well.

What I’m most impressed by in this title is the merging of a classic genre (RTS) with the unique features of the facebook platform.  The single player element of the game has you developing a base, resource collecting and building up an army of cute monsters with which you will attack your foes.  While light attacks will come from computer generated wild monsters the main element of combat is taking on other players of the game – I’m yet to get to this point to won’t comment on it, I’m confident it will work well going on my previous experience of this game and others.

The game looks simply gorgeous, clean simple graphics that wouldn’t look out of place in a full blown boxed game.  I’m very very impressed with what these guys have achieved in this respect.  The game is predominantly played within the facebook window, but you can go full screen if you need to see more of the play area, a feature that works very well and I’m sure many more games will take note of this feature.

I know I haven’t gone into the game too, but I truly see this as one of the best social games out there with something for everyone, and as it’s free to play you can all try it for yourselves – and I really hope you do.  The Casual Collective are doing great things in this space at the moment and I hope they can keep up the good work.

With facebook games advancing, iPad bringing sophistication to the mobile gaming platform and increasing numbers of smart phones the new guard of gaming is truly coming into it’s own.  3DS and the other tradition based new platforms will really have to be something special to keep up with new formats.  It will be a fascinating battle to watch and will only benefit us – the gamers as new merges with old in our available playtime.

Tags: 3ds, backyard monsters, casual, core, desktop defender, facebook, hardcore, ipad, rts, smart phone, the casual collective, web

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.