Monster Burner Review By mancide, 10 May 2013 FollowtopicsMonster Burner (WP)UbisoftReviewGame reviewActionmancide Monster Burner (WP) Achievements is the latest free-to-play game available on the Windows Phone platform. Like most other free-to-play phone titles, the micro-transactions are not required to complete the game, but will likely speed your process along considerably.The premise of Monster Burner is simple, hordes of monsters have raided your country's castles in search of gold supplies. Fortunately for you, a wise old man has taught you the secrets of casting fire spells to help you defeat them and collect the gold. The controls are simple: tap to create your fireball and hold your finger down longer to grow its size. Flick your finger with various speeds to send it hurling. Use two fingers to swipe across the battlefield to create fire-walls. Double tap the screen to send a wave of fire crashing down on the incoming monsters. This game was reviewed on an HTC HD7S running Windows Phone 7.8, and some control issues were experienced during the gameplay. Sometimes fire-walls would be unintentionally placed, and since fire-walls and fire-waves cost in-game currency to purchase, this was a frustrating experience. As previously mentioned, Monster Burner includes the ability to buy items from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace to aid in your quest to burn as many monsters as you can. You can purchase items ranging from a coin bag that magically doubles the amount of coins you collect (and this reviewer did just that) to various sized containers of coins for MSP. Items you can purchase with MSP range from 160 MSP for the magic coin bag all the way up to 7,680 MSP for 2,500,000 in-game coins. Various game modes will keep you coming back to the title regularly. In addition to the normal progression of levels in the regular campaign, you will find a daily challenge game that presents you with a unique level each day. Additionally, players can play a "Gold Rush" game mode once every six hours that will help you collect extra in-game currency to spend on the various upgrades available to you. If you have a lot of friends with this title on your Xbox LIVE friends list, you may even find yourself replaying levels to keep your gamer picture atop the leaderboards. Finally, you can unlock additional challenges (including "Survivor Mode") by spending in-game gold.The achievement list is fairly straightforward, and none of the previously mentioned micro-transactions are required to obtain any of the achievements. With that being said, if you are attempting to complete this game quickly, having extra gold to throw at power-ups will cut down on your time spent with Monster Burner. Completing each of the areas with an average of 100% efficiency will require you to spend in-game currency on powering up your fireball. These power-ups will also help you collect all of the game orbs in each area, as well as earn the achievements tied to collecting various amounts of these orbs. There is also one achievement tied to buying every power-up available to you. The only challenge you need to unlock for an achievement is the "Survivor Mode" which is tied to the Survivor achievement.Overall, Monster Burner offers a different twist on the puzzle genre of mobile games. With elements of action and an item up-grade system, this title has all of the pieces to keep you coming back to it in short spurts for the foreseeable future. During this review, there were some noticeable freezes and long loading times, but this could be attributed to the older HTC HD7S hardware on which this game was reviewed.The reviewer spent over eight hours hurling fireballs at on-coming monsters, purchased a magic coin purse for MSP, and unlocked eight of twenty achievements. The review was done with a personal copy "purchased" by the reviewer.More Monster Burner stories: Heap of Windows Phone Titles Delisted Monster Burner No Longer Free on Windows Phone Windows Phone Release: May 8th, 2013 ReviewWindows Phone Written by mancideWhen not enjoying video games, our fearless newshound enjoys an nice pint of fermented barley and hops in a variety of styles. India Pale Ales, Stouts, Porters, Witbiers, Saisons, Gose, Lambics, Barleywine, you name it. If it has water, malted barley, hops and yeast in it, I'll consume it.I also enjoy all things technological, Doctor Who, wrasslin, traveling, and spending time with my family.