Monday Night Combat

Deep and intricate gameplay

With just two game modes, six solider classes and eight robot types - not to mention the swollen caricature visuals and pervading frat-boy humour - you'd be forgiven for equating MNC's budget price with a budget experience. But these superficial shortcomings belie unexpectedly deep and intricate gameplay.

'I said giddy up, dammit!'

Blitz mode, for example, can be played in single-player, two-player splitscreen, or with up to four players over Xbox Live. Nothing unusual there, but playing through with each soldier class brings true variety to gameplay.

This might be the subtle shift between the hit-and-run and defensive styles of the Assault and Gunner classes. Or it might be the game-changing switch to the Support class - an engineer/medic hybrid - where pure tower defence is your only hope. Alternatively, try camping with the Sniper and his incredibly powerful but agonisingly slow-firing rifle, or speed around cloaked as the Assassin, with her super-fast melee daggers and stun-inducing smoke bombs.

Even in single-player mode, this genuine variation provides a five-fold increase to replay value. And in co-operative, with vastly increased robot numbers, individual play styles and class combinations need to be carefully considered to beat the tougher competitions or last a respectable time amid the infinite waves of Sudden Death.

Attack of the Gnomes

There's real variety in enemy bots, too - and a whole heap of charm. Black Jacks are the archetypal TD creep fiend: single-minded and relentless; Gremlins live up to their name as fast, scurrying nuisances; and Bouncers bound innocently towards you like adorable puppy dogs before bowling you over to waste valuable time. But the real stars of MNC are Jackbots, robotic behemoths who can inflict and sustain heavy damage. Arriving up to eight at a time, they can obliterate defences in an instant, and require focussed effort and firepower to bring down.