Wreaking Havoc, One Car at a Time
I came to Sokomonster on the back of another from Afil Games, that of SokoCrab. That latter game is a straight up Sokoban styled puzzler; an easy playthrough that rarely ever provides a test of gaming skills or puzzle nous. Sokomonster on the other hand whips things up in more of a block sliding stylee as opposed to pushing. And it’s a LOT trickier as a result. It’s not as good either.
In Sokomonster you play as a monster intent on wrecking havoc through a city. The keyart alone implies that this could well be seen as an alternative to something like Rampage from back in the day; a huge lizard pounding through town, grabbing cars, chucking them like confetti. In truth, it’s nothing of the sort and this single screen puzzler works very much like the plethora of other cheap and cheerful sliding puzzlers that the world has been overrun with.
City Smashing Strategy: Mastering the Art of Car-Fu
The premise is simple – destroy the town that you find yourself frequenting, in this case by pushing stranded vehicles through a road system, smashing them into various sized buildings, flattening them in the process. Clear a stage of cars and buildings, and you’ll find yourself heading to a new location, tasked with repeating similar actions. As you would expect, those puzzles ramp up in difficulty too, and after just a few stages that welcome the player to the mechanics and ideas, Sokomonster fast turns into a bit of a brain melter. We have no qualms in admitting that roughly halfway through the 30 levels, a Youtube walkthrough was required to set us back on the right track. Our controllers and house walls thanked us for it.
Walking into cars sends them shifting in a straight line, skidding along the streets until they come to a stop. From there, kicking them from another direction continues to send them north, south, east or west – at least that is until they come into contact with a building, at which point each explodes into smithereens. To complete Sokomonster, you’ll need to attempt to understand how each stage is set, moving cars from one place to another, banging into each other to open up new pathways and routes, occasionally using stuck-in-the-mud craters to aid. Only once you understand the intricacies, will you find success in your city domination plans.
Rarely does Sokomonster deviate from that idea. Yes, larger buildings need toppling, with two and three story structures requiring two and three vehicles to go crashing into them. And later down the line, as you traverse the Big City and Military Base, pockets of fire start to emerge, leaving you to forgo the need to take down buildings and instead just push cars through the flames. For us, it feels like a weird development decision to just go chucking that fire in willy-nilly, especially when Sokomonster ends on standard footings. But hey, it is what it is and we guess it breaks up the norm a little. And if things start to go a little awry as you whack those cars, whether by mistake or with best intentions, it’s nice that both full level restarts and undoing of recent moves is just a button press away.
Short and Sweet: Conquering Sokomonster in 90 Minutes
With some fairly retro visuals allowing portrayal of your destructive monster, a few varieties of cars and different coloured buildings, it’s safe to say that we won’t be remembering Sokomonster for its visual prowess come the end of the year. In fact, we probably won’t remember Sokomonster for much after this week is out, safe in the knowledge that full completion can be ticked off in 90 minutes or so; depending on how well you get to grips with the puzzling nature of things. We’d suspect that should you be a fan of Sokoban or ice-sliding puzzlers, you’ll mostly find yourself smashing through everything Sokomonster has with ease.
Get to the end of those 30 stages, and Afil Games have seen right to provide some additional replayability. Whether you take them up on the offer or not will be up for debate (we’d suspect you won’t), but if you do want to head back in to any of the levels again, to better your stage completion time or to shed a few moves/actions from a PB, then you can do so. A rather crude level hub area at least allows for it. We really don’t see the need to play through any of the stages in Sokomonster again once complete, though.
A Challenging but Forgettable Puzzler
We can’t walk away from Sokomonster and pretend we enjoyed our time with it, but aside from building frustrations at the solving of each puzzle, it rarely does anything wrong. We just about prefer the pushing of SokoCrab over the sliding of this little monster, but your personal decision may vary. With a low asking price and promise of easy Gamerscore, we’re sure Sokomonster will appeal to a few.
Just be prepared to fire up that Youtube walkthrough video before any controller goes flying…
Sokomonster Links
Sokomonster: Unleash Your Inner Monster and Demolish the City in this Puzzle-Packed Rampage – https://www.thexboxhub.com/sokomonster-unleash-your-inner-monster-and-demolish-the-city-in-this-puzzle-packed-rampage/
Buy Sokomonster on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/sokomonster/9MW0X9GZ77RN
