When it came out last year for Xbox 360, Monster Madness: Battle For Suburbia, for the lack of a better word, sucked. Why? The controls were a joke, forcing you to both aim with the right analog stick and hold down the trigger button to fire. The graphics suffered from constant break up, with jittery animation and horrible camera angles. Fortunately, Southpeak improved its PlayStation 3 edition, Monster Madness: Grave Danger. It's hardly the best monster-bashing game ever made, but it's certainly more enjoyable.

There isn't much to the story, but it lays the groundwork for the action. Four high school kids find their neighborhood overrun by an army of zombies. They must use everything they can get their hands on to fend them off, from living room furniture to machetes. Along the way, a biker-like dude named Larry, who works out of a modified school bus, provides them with weapons, such as nail guns or a homemade flamethrower. It all leads up to an inevitable showdown with the source of the evil.

At its core, Monster Madness: Grave Danger's goal is to see how quickly you kill these freaks. Fortunately, shooting your weapon is much easier this time around. All you need to do is point the right analog stick at your enemies to fire. If some enemies are too close, you can switch to melee combat by pressing the circle button. With a number of guns and weapons available, there's no shortage of ammunition.

The game is less frustrating, too. If by some chance you happen to lose all your health (and can't refill it grabbing a soda from a nearby vending machine), you automatically regenerate from where you died. This is a helpful enhancement over Battle For Suburbia's broken game save system. The $40 price tag doesn't hurt either, even though not everyone will feel a zombie obliterating game is worth that much.

Yes, there's dancing zombies in the game, but where's Michael Jackson? Click to see more images from the game...

Grave Danger also features more extras than the original game. A new online co-op mode allows you to fight alongside three friends through the PlayStation Network. Although our sessions ran into a small amount of lag, it works well overall. Several minigames and challenges are also here, including a few based on such games as Pac-Man and Dance Dance Revolution.

Visually, Grave Danger was spruced up. Gone are the broken animations and jittery frame rate. The game runs more smoothly, with a fair amount of attention given to the torn-apart city and the enemies that inhabit it. There are occasional problems, including collision detection issues when you're in a vehicle (we kept hitting invisible walls) and camera angles you can't manually adjust. The audio remains mostly the same, with squeaky character voices (especially the female characters) and repetitive pip organ horror music.

Even with its flaws, Monster Madness: Grave Danger is a fun time-waster to play with friends. It's good to see that the new version of the game leaves it's nightmare to play status behind and finally lets gamers play a game about a nightmare instead.

Related Links

Monster Madness: Grave Danger Game Guide

Southpeak Games

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