What’s up with the future, man? If the video games are to be believed, sometime around 2050 or so, humanity’s going to abandon all this shabby pretence of civility and indulge its basest atavistic savagery with corporate-endorsed arena deathsports. Two thousand years of conscientious social evolution, and we’re the ****ing Roman Empire all over again, now sponsored by Burger King. Eheu, futura non sunt eadem quae quondam fuerunt. 

Anyway, Monday Night Combat. It’s basically Team Fortress mashed up with Defence of the Ancients, stuffed with loads of robots and a few scraps of bacon, and presented as a gameshow. And while it’s so obviously Team Fortress mashed up with Defence of the Ancients, and stuffed with loads of robots and a few scraps of bacon, and presented as a gameshow, it plays like something completely unique. 

The big idea is Orange versus Blue, and each team must destroy the other team’s Moneyball. A Moneyball is exactly what it says on the box – it’s a massive ball of money. Then stuff gets a bit more complicated.

Each team’s base constantly spawns a variety of robots, who will push forward with all the implacable, inexorable determination of, well, robots, and attempt to destroy each other and/or the other team’s Moneyball. They’re mostly running interference, although only Breach bot-types can take out a Moneyball’s energy shielding. At random intervals, both bases simultaneously spawn a Jackbot, a sort of lumbering behemoth with massive amounts of armour and a pair of devastating attacks. 

Each team’s base is also set about with a number of turret substructures, where a range of turrets can be placed and subsequently upgraded. 

So far, so tower defence. Enter the Pros – these are the six player classes. Each class has its own idiosyncratic gameplay features, perks, and loadouts – the Assault class, for example, is a sort of all-rounder run-and-gunner, while the Support class is somewhere between a medic and an engineer. All classes have four upgradeable abilities, one of which is passive, and the others typically being some kind of useful field ability, such as cloaking, hacking enemy turrets, or the hilarious Product Grenade that plasters advertisements all over opponents’ screens, temporarily obscuring their view of the entire game. Each class is also able to spawn a unique bot-type from the base deployment. 

All turret and class upgrades are purchased with in-game cash. Players start out with a modest amount of this, and there’s a fixed cash award for each frag. Killed enemies also drop additional cash pickups as well as occasional perk pickups, which provide  temporary skill buffs.

Shove all this stuff into a 6 vs 6 match, and the result is some of the most terrific chaos your Xbox has ever hosted. It’s clever, it’s relentless, and it’s loads of fun. If you’re into team-oriented games, you simply cannot skip Monday Night Combat. It’s been out two days, and it’s already pretty much essential gaming.

Outside of the lead multiplayer mode, Crossfire (described above), there’s also an excellent four-way co-op invasion mode called Blitz. It’s a bit like a single team version of Crossfire (or something like Gears of War 2’s Horde mode), with players defending their Moneyball against waves of robot spawns. 

Monday Night Combat is tagged at 1200 MSP, and available now on XBLA. 

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