I received this game for Christmas and have logged about 12 hours on it so far. I’ve really been enjoying it.

Monster Lab has loads of kitschy monster movie ambiance and Halloweenie vibes. It also has really great, addictive gameplay.

The game is essentially a collection of mini-games, somewhat like the Wario game, Smooth Moves, but less random. You build a monster from a small collection of parts then go out completing quests and mini-games, and also fighting other monsters to get ingredients to make more parts. Each part you create (heads, arms, legs and torsos) requires you complete a usually pretty fun mini-game themed to what you are building. (Tossing brains into a skull to build a head or wrestling an arm under a grow light to make an arm, etc.) There are loads of combinations to create the various parts and it’s a lot of fun to see what you’ll get.

Oddly, though the mini-games are always timed and sometimes a little stressful, combat is turn based. No button-mashing is required when you get into a fight, just decent strategy.

Potential turn-offs are that the story is simplistic and the humor is corny. However that seems to fit the game, somehow.

I’ll write an actual review when I finish it, but I wanted to write a little about it now because I’m enjoying it so much.