Monsters University Game Review (iPhone)

We’ve recently had the chance of playing some absolutely amazing games based on movies (Despicable Me: Minion Rush comes to mind first) so I was pretty excited about Monsters University, the iPhone game based on the upcoming Disney – Pixar movie. Unfortunately, my high expectations were in vain as it seems that no overnight change of the universe happened and generally games based on movies are still sucky.

The interesting fact about Monsters University is that for 99 cents you actually get two games: Catch Archie and Toxicity Challenge. In reality, we’re talking about two very similar games – both being endless runners. Divided into stages, so no that endless after all…

Catch Archie is the first game that you can play in Monsters University for iPhone and it challenges you to do exactly as the title says: catch Archie, the pink pig-shaped monster that manages to escape from the University. Using endless runner mechanics like left/right swipes, changing lanes and collecting tokens, Catch Archie is divided into levels that you have to complete in a given time. It never happened to me to run out of time (my character magically gets close enough to catch Archie as soon as there are just seconds left) so I guess you’ll never fail at this game. Which has some strange elements, like an unpleasant and awkward point of view which is somewhat from the right, instead of the full back we’re used with. Also, changing lanes is not possible as your character will always run in the middle and you will have to swipe left or right to avoid the obstacles, but the character returns to the middle. If you’re an adult and you have played a video game in the past 5 years, this will be boooring.

Things are getting a bit better and regular with the second game available in Monsters University, Toxicity Challenge. This looks a lot more like an endless runner with five lanes to run on, coins to collect and more obstacles to avoid. Again, this is on the very easy side as the overall speed of the game is that of an old snail. In other words, perfect for kids, extremely not challenging for adults.

A great thing about Monsters University is that it has some amazing graphics and features the main characters in the movie, clearly a bonus for the little ones. There also new levels to unlock, power-ups and character cards, but none enough to consider Monsters Unigamesity an amazing game.

Probably kids would enjoy it more than I did: it has bright graphics, it is easy from an adult’s point of view, but it still doesn’t bring much to the table. But since it’s the Monsters University we’re talking about, your little one will probably want to play it anyway, no matter what I say about the game. But for you: better stay away from it!

iTunes link: Monsters University
Final rating: 6.4 out of 10