Monster Intros 4: Ghost, Morel and Glob
Hey, hey! This is the last one to these, since there are only nine (playable) monsters. I'll have to think up some new stuff next Saturday.
First up we have Ghost, who is the only unlocked monster when you first play. Ghost's special ability is a double-move, which means you can execute two moves in one turn. This can be moving two tiles, moving a tile and planting a bomb, attacking an enemy and planting a bomb. Any combination of two moves.
Ghost also has one more bomb than most other monsters, though this isn't for any specific reason, it was mostly a way to make her slightly easier to play as. This combined with the double-move special makes her a lot of fun to play as, since you can get yourself out of (or in some cases into) horrible situations.
Somehow a giant sentient mushroom is a monster, and Morel seemed like an apt name. I guess the absurdity of this character design didn't really dawn on me until recently, but I like it so much that I don't even care.
Morel is also one of my favorite monsters to play as because of her special attack. As a big fan of old school first person shooters, the idea of adding a telefrag to my own game (which is neither first person nor a shooter) was too much to pass up. A giant teleporting mushroom? Yes.
This ability is a lot of fun but it also required some tweaking. It's incredibly powerful because it takes out any enemy (you will teleport to the closest enemy when you use it) in one move. On top of that you use up two souls to perform it but you will always collect the soul of whoever you telefrag, so it feels like it only has a cost of one soul. Initially you could string together as many telefrags as you wanted (as long as you had the souls) and you could wipe out an entire level if you had a decent cache of souls at the start. The solution that ended up feeling the best was adding a cooldown to the ability. So now you have to wait three turns before you can use it a second time. It prevents you from chaining it together but keeps it quite powerful.
And finally we have Glob. Glob is probably the most difficult monster to play as. While his passive ability is that he deals double damage his health and bomb pool are both very low. This means that while you can take out most enemies in just one hit, you also don't have a lot of margin for error. It's an interesting challenge.
On top of that Glob's special attack will slime enemies nearby. While this can be useful it does make enemies behave erratically (there's a chance they won't be able to take their turn, just like when the player is slimed) so you can't always count on getting close to them. A lot of times I find using your special attack can be a good way to waste a turn when an enemy is one tile away from you and your health is low, but when slimed there's a chance they won't move anyway. So he's challenge to play as, but that's by design. I swear!
Anyway, this is the last of the Monster Intros series, I hope you've enjoyed them!