Backyard Monsters: Inferno Review (PC Online)

Base Game

Backyard Monsters is pretty much a standard browser-based, real-time strategy game. The player constructs a base or yard, from which they can spawn monsters to assault the yards of others. To accomplish this, the player must accumulate various resources from harvester buildings. Harvesters will produce resources automatically, but they must be emptied into the bank at regular intervals. Resources have several different uses, including building defensive towers and walls, unlocking new monsters, as well as upgrading existing buildings and monsters. The player can gain additional resources by destroying buildings in another person’s yard, as if killing things wasn’t motivation enough.

Like many other Facebook games, Backyard Monsters is Free-to-Play but also includes a premium system that provides perks for those who pay money. Using a currency called “Shiny”, a hundred of which equates to one dollar, players can greatly increase the efficiency of their monsters and buildings. Like most games of its type, Backyard Monsters is paced very slowly, with high level builds taking hours or days to complete. The player can “Speed Up” the process by paying Shiny to either decrease construction time or instantly finish the project. Shiny can also reduce the wait even further via the purchase of extra resources. While all of these are reasonable ways to utilize a premium system, it still seems possible to break the game with money. There are a number of consumable power-ups that the player can purchase to be more effective in combat. These power-ups can be used to temporarily boost the efficiency of production facilities as well as the overall effectiveness of turrets and monsters. While no single perk is overpowered on its own, I can imagine that being able to constantly purchase them would give someone an unprecedented advantage over others. Luckily, there is a twenty-four hour cool down on each power up to prevent over usage. I can’t say for certain whether this cool down affects all power ups at once, but I would be concerned if it didn’t.