These Kidnapped Monsters Are Sated Only By Eating Entire Cows In Monsters&Bones
Monsters&Bones ($0.99) by Robert Lulek is a novel arcade game where you are an alien who has kidnapped monsters from their home world and brought them to yours.
For some reason, it's important to keep them alive, so you naturally feed them whole live cows. The problem is that the monsters and cows are spread out and your planet is a dangerous place.
Each game starts off with the alien (that's you) hovering in a strange looking jungle. Once you begin the level with a quick tap, you'll have to keep yourself airborne by pressing the fly button on the bottom right. You can move left or right by tilting your iDevice.
On the top right is a mini map, which provides useful information. It shows the layout of the level you're on, the location of your alien (a green dot), the monsters (as orange dots), and the cows (as white dots).
All you have to do is pair up the monsters and the cows so that the monsters can eat the cows. Sounds simple enough, but there's more to it than first meets the eye.
To get them together, you'll have to navigate your ship to a monster or cow (it doesn't matter which, either of them can be moved). Once there, make your alien's ship hover closer to the thing you want to pick up. A targeting reticle will appear and try to lock on. Once it has, press the button on the bottom left and the monster or cow will be beamed up into your ship.
Only one thing can be held in the ship at a time.
What makes this game such fun to play is the wide variety of challenges you're presented with. In some levels, you'll have gates that need to be opened up by a lever. You'll have to make a monster or cow sit on the lever while you get everything in place.
On other levels you'll have some brown cows along with the white cows. You will have to get the right monster to the right cow, as they tend to be very fussy.
Regardless of a particular level's challenges, there are some hazards that are always present. For a start, the monsters are so hungry that the health bars above their heads will steadily decrease until they're fed. In other words, you have only a limited amount of time to complete each level.
Also, there's often some alien plant life trying to eat your whole ship or shoot at you. Then there are the very large spikes just waiting for you to fly too close and make you go bang.
Monsters&Bones is a wonderfully unique and challenging game. It has an original concept that will undoubtedly have you hooked before long. This one is not to be missed.
