Hyperbaric Monsters

I swear, sometimes it’s like game designers don’t even test their games out to see if they are actually fun. I’ve been playing the newest Mini Monsters (Minimon) game over the last week or so, ever since it came out. I’ve got this great team of Minimon that can beat pretty much any opponent, at least in theory. The problem is that this game has a brutal poisoning condition, which causes your Minimon to lose health outside of battle. Basically every fight ends up with your Minimon being poisoned, which means you’ve got to haul it back to the Minimon centre for healing in a hyperbaric chamber all the dang time. It’s so frustrating.

Like, come on! We have portable hyperbaric chambers within Melbourne. How hard would it be to put one in the game, which lets you heal your Mimimon on the go? You can’t tell me that the game designers tested this thing and thought it was fun. Running between towns after every battle, wasting hours of your time, is not compelling gameplay.

It wasn’t always like this, you know. In the previous games, there used to be items that would heal your poisoned furry friends, but it seems they’ve removed that from this game. The team at Freaky Games said poison healing was a “gimmick” which wouldn’t be reused. That would be fine if it wasn’t a total lie. Every Minimon game has had poison healing items, including the spinoffs.

I don’t understand. Did anyone at Freaky Games even test this product? You can’t tell me they kept running between towns for healing and thought it was totally fine. It’s not fine. It’s boring at best and infuriating at worst.

If I, a regular consumer of the game, can tell that there are these massive issues in the product, then why can’t the company creating it? Don’t they have playtesters? Quality assurance managers or something? Surely somebody could have pointed out that the game is no longer fun without items that can heal the poisoned condition. I feel like I’m going crazy here!