To be honest this game does work and it works well, its actually quite fun choosing the five characters that you want to take into battle from you large deck of cards. It’s not just a case of picking and hoping either, after all the game is called Elemental Monstar for a reason, and that reason is that one type of creature is another’s weakness. As you would expect from the title, Hudson have introduced all of the elements into play, therefore you have Fire, Water, Earth, Forest, Light and Dark, therefore putting Water against Fire or Light against Dark is the only way to win the day.

 

 

I also mentioned that this game plays like with Tower Defence style, well basically when the game starts creatures come onto the screen and then follow a path until they reach the other end, obviously if they get there without you stopping them then you will lose a life and if they keep getting to the other end of the screen without you stopping them then you will eventually lose the game.

 

So how do you win? Well as mentioned at the beginning of the game you will choose five cards from a deck, then once the game begins you can play the card wherever you are able to on the battlefield to bring your chosen creature to life. You can continue this process as often as you want to using the gems you will have earned from killing the enemy creatures or if you want you can choose to upgrade the current creature’s level to make them more powerful.

 

As you win battles you will unlock new cards which can be purchased with any money you have earned. Each card has its own screen where you can view the art, stats (such as damage, range etc) and of course it’s elemental type.

 

Obviously choosing the right cards is imperative to winning the battle, so make sure you choose wisely at the beginning of the round. Each round has 50 waves of creatures so it can be quite difficult to judge what cards to take into what round, some creatures fly for example meaning that you will have to take in a mix of air and ground based cards, whereas others are obviously invulnerable to certain attacks, therefore getting the mix right can be quite difficult. There really is a great mix of cards and since you acquire most of the creatures that you fight against you really do end up knowing how to use them to your advantage. Another point worth mentioning is that some cards even have abilities that benefit the other creatures around them.

 

 

The presentation side of Elemental Monstar is quite well done, the art of the cards is particularly impressive as are the character models, all that really lets the game down in this area is the maps which aren’t really much to look at. It would have been nice to have a bit more colour and detail to the maps but you can’t have everything I guess.

 

Elemental Monstar is a real fun game to play, mixing card based strategy with tower defense seems to work well and offers a good challenge. Sure it’s not perfect to look at but who cares when it’s this much fun?