Gutes Spiel errinnert etwas an Pokemon.

Technically a great game. Just in these times people want building, colony building, farming and being rewarded with creating something. Just repetitive monster fights is probably not enough. A farming sim in this engine/art style would be awesome and could get bigger than Stardew!

Walking simulator.

Keep in mind that I only played about 2 hours, there might be something good after that. However, I do not feel like playing more for 2 reasons:

First, there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of walking. The map is divided up into "rooms" where you move between these rooms by walking into the border like most metroidvanias. However, these rooms are big, bland, and require boring platforming to move trough them. Now there are games that do big open-world right, by giving you fun movement options with a high skill ceiling so you have fun going from A to B. This is not one of those games. I started to dread exploration and straying off the path to look for secrets, since the presence of a one-way meant that choosing to explore an area meant another 8-minute loop of holding a directional key to get back to the same place before that one-way. Games are supposed to be fun, right?

The second big meh for me were the battles, and mainly the customization of monsters. Each monster has a skilltree, shown in screenshot #4 on this page. This skilltree contains a lot of interesting looking synergy options, but in the end these are nothing game-changing. My mind immediately saw a lot of interesting combos and setups I could make here, but then I realized most of those required so many skillpoints that I would be traversing boring terrain and using the same low-level strategies on repetitive battles for many hours more.

Sounds more like a job than a pasttime to me. If you are the type who spends thousands of hours grinding stuff in old-school runescape, maybe this is easy-peasy and fun for you. Sure, go for it. But if you want to press play on a game and have fun from the start, watch out.

Art is great though

A game where you can relax and play.

A great game. It's pretty, the music is good, the monster are endearing and the gameplay is both great and intuitive. Every monster is viable, has a whole buttload of different possible builds with an incredible amount of equipment which only further increases each monster's customizability. Not only that, the diversity in teams is incredible, especialy once you realise nothing is stopping you from taking the same monster multiple times.

All in all, a great game. And no, this isn't pokemon at all.

This really isn't a good game but it is enjoyable and totally worth the money.

Negatives:
The story is bastardized
Difficulty spiking from nowhere
Maps and ideas are clones from other games

Positives
Combat is addicting and really fun unless its the 6v6 mode

*Beaten in exactly 12h*

A Creature Collector meets Metroidvania exploration. The difficulty on this one scales in such a way that enemies stay in line to your expected level so nothing really feels too easy or impossibly hard, it feels just right playing on normal.

The good thing about Monster Sanctuary is that there is no real useless monster, everything from the starter you get, to the cute little rock that you find in the first area, to the cat with a sword hitting for hundreds to thousands later, to the boss monsters you can get eggs from. One thing is for certain though is that elemental-less attacks seem to clearly better when you aren't pre-paring for certain areas or bosses. There are some units that are clearly better then others in a vacuum, but you'll find quite varied teams if you look them up otherwise.

That said, Though it can help to look up individual monster skill allocations and builds, you aren't really punished for building one any perticular way considering skill resets can be bought at some point for 300g each if you feel under powered and when you get into the later pvp fights you will in fact feel lacking.

A general tip for people that want it and not get spoiled on anything, it helps to have one tanky shield/heal spammer, one to disrupt enemies + boost the combo counter by hitting a lot since your damage goes up the higher the counter, and one heavy nuker at the end to take all that combo scaling to hit really hard, sometimes one-shotting full teams. That said if you're like me, you'll forget that in pvp fights only 2 monsters gets to do anything turn 1, and be surprised when your turn gets passed after setting up.

Overall, highly recommend for anyone that likes exploring and collecting creatures, since there seems to be no limit to how many monsters you can hold (i don't think anyways, never really tested that lol). Even if you don't use them all in fights you'll want a lot of monsters that have different exploration effects from pressing switches, hovering, breaking walls, or activating elemental orbs. Any duplicate effects you can either offer up for stuff or throw them in a later game nursary that you can go pick up freely later, but you'll get a feel for what you want or need at any point, and if you realize you want them later, they hatch at a level that scales with your total exploration so that lvl 3 monster in the 1st area you need will maybe hatch into a level 30+ based on your current level or amount of exploration. Surprizingly not grindy for a game that has levels and a lot of monsters.

Just have fun with it.

Great game. Love the 8-bit graphics. Movement is smooth, combat is interesting and the game is pretty big too.Has puzzle elements in it as well as Pokemon style combat.

Here we are with an indie game made by a couple people. Ofcourse that's a generous head count. There are always a guy somewhere with an idea. Ideas comes with their questions. Where this game or their creators come apart from their usual competitors is nothing sort of amazing to me. For all the questions about how to make things, they got all the answers. While I have an opinian about art, sound and story, they had to take the backseat for gameplay in this one.

Somehow everything plays like it should. Every decision made in its perfect space and implemented seamlessly. I cannot overstate the fact that how I love this game plays. You wanted to make a metroidvania with pokeymans? Then lets not bother with lose states. Implement lots of catch up mechanics. Save anywhere. Made it so you could access menus from any point. Lets add maps that makes sense. Mons can have diversified tactics yet these should feel accessible from any time you want to engage them. You want to farm items? Boom things now scale for how well you doing or how much further you progressed. I cried a lot about some games being somewhat disrespectful to your time. Monster Sanctuary is opposite of that. I play half an hour here, an hour there. And I have kept progressing thru it always. Every new exploration, item or skill mechanics made it more fun. It was a pleasure whole 30 hours.

Musics really dont need to be bangers for every game. When it changes from one to another, I get amused from how cool most songs are. Its weird to have good soundtracks as a small time devs. But they choose to be the weirdest. Love the songs. Also sfx were quite distinct, makes exploration easier. Its easy to make things sub-par. They must really like games man..

The whole plays like a pleasant jrpg. There is a very straight, very fitting story about the origins and events about the game world. Since its a mon fighting game, they make the story child friendly too. But I approve the messages. It was cute and I never bored of it.

And my last points will be about the art of the game. I think its very very fitting. Mons were varied enough. Artstyles never clash. I kinda liked how everything moves. This is basically the 2d platforming genre design prequisite. Top games looks amazing sure, but this pixelart was enough to make it one of the better games out there. I dont want to sound condescending. But I wondered how famous it could get with a state of the art modern looks. Maybe it was out of their scope. I cant even imagine how it should look. What can I imagine is this game being 10 time more famous than it already is. They got so many things right. I recommend to anyone so they can get 10 times more successful.

this game is so damn fantastic that i couldnt stop playing. Beat it and now i want more. Absolutely amazing, no lie.