Halfbrick, having already invented and mastered the object slashing genre with their popular app Fruit Ninja, are about to unleash their take on another casual gaming genre, albeit one more familiar to iOS gamers. Monster Dash is Halfbrick's newest game, and is an endless horizontal platformer, similar in nature to Canabalt.
Monster Dash stars a sarcastic antihero named Barry Steakfries, who should be familiar to fans of Halfbrick's PSP games, as he was the protagonist of the arena shooter Age of Zombies. In this game, he is running forward, shooting zombies, mummies, vampires and other types of supernatural horrors that cross his path. You have two commands - jump and shoot - and a health bar that allows you to track the damage you take from enemies and spikes before dying. You can pick up additional health and various weapons as you constantly run forward, including my new favorite weapon, the machine gun jetpack, which fires downward as it propels you upwards.
Monster Dash provides several different random locales for you to run forward in, although the only key difference is the visuals, but you will see different level types every 1000 meters. Every time you die, you get a humorous one-liner from Barry Steakfries, sporting similar smarmy and sarcastic humor as was in Age of Zombies (which still hasn't been confirmed for iOS yet, despite being a perfect fit considering the popularity of twin-stick shooters on the platform), along with the ability to check OpenFeint leaderboards and to tweet your score. Monster Dash is an intriguing attempt to bring some more action to the endless platformer genre, which gamers will get to play starting August 19th.
