Gamehouse, a developer best known for bringing UNO and Scrabble to Facebook, recently released The Secret Plant Society, a new take on plant growing/farming games.  Though similar in many ways to earlier farm games, Secret Plant Society introduces a few new mechanics, including hybridizing plants to create newer and more profitable strains.

Secret Plant Society is based around plants and pots.  The game starts you off with a small greenhouse, a couple ornaments, nine “starter pots” and some seeds.  Unlike most other farming games, you have no avatar present on screen, so all interaction is based on clicking your plants and tools.

You start by learning how to plant the most basic plant, the Common Clover, which takes 15 minutes to mature.  After 15 minutes, you click the harvest button to harvest, and receive a new Common Clover seed to plant, experience, coins, and an empty plot to plant in again.  The interesting mechanic is that sometimes side-by-side plants will hybridize and create a seed for a new strain of plant.  For instance, a Common Clover planted next to another Common Clover will sprout a Vigorous Clover seed.  All plants and their hybrids are recorded in your Almanac, allowing you to see which combinations have been tried and what combinations might still be undiscovered.

For plants like the Common Clover that mature in 15 minutes, and the Vigorous Clover which matures in 3 hours, the starter pots are just fine as they hold up to 3 hours of water.  However, more advanced plants such as the Scarlet Spiral Begonia take 10 hours to mature.  Plants will only mature as long as there is water in the pot. So, if you logged in only once a day, on the second day your Scarlet Spiral Begonia would have matured only 3 of the necessary 10 hours.  Higher level pots hold more water, allowing plants to grow longer without your help. These are especially helpful as you reach higher levels, where plants can require up to 2 days to mature.

Other familiar mechanics and concepts find their way into Secret Plant Society, providing recognizable incentives for players.  Quests give players goals to work towards and introduce new concepts.  Plant Society also gives you the option to unlock or purchase items using a virtual currency called “Green Bucks.” Some items are merely decorative, but you can also purchase fertilizer which reduces the amount of time required for plants to mature.  As mentioned above, players gain experience points and levels from raising and breeding plants, which unlock more plants and tools from the shop.

Though you can invite friends to play Secret Plant Society with you, there aren’t many social aspects so far.  You can add friends to your Members list, visit the greenhouses of people on your Members list and vice versa.  Upon visiting, you can help them to water their plants, and they can help you water yours, but apart from that there doesn’t seem to be anything else you can do for your friends.

Overall, Secret Plant Society is a fun game that almost feels like a real foray into growing, harvesting, and breeding plants.  The mechanics of the game mesh very well with the overall design, making the overall experience quite fluid.

One issue that might dissuade some players is that gameplay can become slow and stale when you grow higher-level plants, which take 18-48 hours to mature.  Furthermore, the lack of any real social aspects doesn’t encourage inviting friends. Likely because of these two problems, The Secret Plant Society is struggling to retain users, with about 140,000 monthly actives but only 6,500 daily actives.  Still, at its base, the game is a new and enjoyable experience with some real potential.

Mobile publisher Gamevil’s first Facebook release, developed by newcomer Lifo Interactive, is a cute and brightly colored city builder game called Train City. With a number of other games featuring trains, including Zynga’s new title CityVille, Train City hopes to attract users with a new city building experience focused on the buying and running of trains through a single city.

Altogether, Train City is an enjoyable game with cute graphics and simple mechanics. Though it lacks in depth, the numerous quests, collections, and tasks can keep players occupied and entertained for long stretches of time. And with the removal of the energy mechanic, players can play for as long as they like and achievements and quests give a constant stream of accomplishments to aim for.

Train City sets you up as mayor of a small town, in charge of growing it into a sprawling, modern metropolis. In order to do so you have to increase the population, keep the people happy, create sources of income, and manage the rail system. As in other games, you construct buildings using coins and gain access to better items and buildings as you gain levels. There is no energy mechanic, so growth is restricted by how much money you have and earn.

Building houses and other dwellings increases your town’s population, but your population can only go as high as your happiness level. Happiness is increased in Train City by building decorations like trees and playgrounds, as well as public buildings like fire stations and preschools. On top of increasing happiness, public buildings also increase the effectiveness of other buildings. For example, the hospital increases the happiness from decorations by one percent. Higher level buildings require special resources such as bricks or glass, which the player must manufacture from factories.

Houses and decorations all cost coins, which are primarily earned through commercial buildings, and your rail line. Commercial buildings, once built, generate a coins over time. Like other games using this mechanic, income is only collected when the player clicks on the building, encouraging players to check in often to get the most income possible out of their buildings. Similarly, factories can be tasked to create materials to build advanced buildings, which you must gather at the end of the production period.

Despite trains being the central theme of Train City, the train and rail system is not central to the game’s progression. Supposedly, the goal of the game is to build an extensive system of tracks, and improve both your stations and trains over time, as well as choose conductors optimal for your needs, but in the end the train system acts as just another source of income in the game, and a less forgiving one than the commercial buildings.

The locations of train tracks, like roads, has little impact on the game except that you require certain amounts of both for some quests. Train station position is similarly not accounted for, and the only purpose of train stations is to increase income. The various trains you can purchase all have stats for capacity and horsepower, but those also appear unimportant.

Your choice of conductor is the most important choice you can make, as each conductor requires an upfront hiring cost and set period of time to work in, with the rewards scaling. Essentially though, all choices you make with regard to the rail system only increase the amount of income gained, with no other impact in the game.

Like other games of this genre, Train City incorporates many social aspects, as well as options to pay for resources. Visiting your neighbor’s cities gives you tourism bonuses of either happiness or population, encouraging you to visit your neighbors on a daily basis.

You can also assist your neighbor’s commercial buildings both earning money for you and your neighbor after the proper amount of time has elapsed, after which you can assist another building. If you’ve run out of coins, you can purchase large amounts of those with real money. “TCash”, which is used to buy special buildings and trains which are more effective than their mundane counterparts, is also available for purchase.

Train City shows a lot of polish, and great art design, with all the pieces of the game fitting into a unified theme. Though some small bugs present themselves on occasion, the play experience is largely unmarred, with all aspects of gameplay being easily accessible and understood. As well put together as it is, Train City may not develop into a hit, given the light gameplay and large variety of competitors in its genres.

Broken Bulb Studios, a mid-sized developer in Scottsdale, Arizona, has finally released a Facebook game that it has been working on over half a year: Miscrits: World of Adventure. In Miscrits, players take one the role of a monster trainer, exploring the wilderness and trying to capture as many monsters (“Miscrits”) as they can. Easy to pick up and learn, Miscrits initially puts players into a single player adventure, but for more advanced hands also offers a multiplayer arena where players can pit their Miscrits against other players in competitive, strategic battles.

Miscrits is part of the character collection and combat sub-genre created by Pokemon, and recently continued on Facebook with the launch of Gaia Online’s Monster Galaxy. The basic idea is to groom one of your hundreds of captured Miscrits, helping them gain levels by doing quests and fighting. Over time, as the creatures gain new powers, a nuanced strategy evolves that keeps players hooked.

Initially, there is no overarching quest or Big Bad Enemy to defeat in Miscrits, and the player’s only goal is to gain levels and capture as many Miscrits as he can. The interface and gameplay of Miscrits is simple and intuitive, especially if you’ve played other monster training games. You control the movement of your avatar through clicking, while more clicks on objects or people allow you to talk, read, or otherwise interact.

In town, you can heal your Miscrits once every hour, train or switch Miscrits at will, and purchase and sell items to aid in battle. You can also enter the arena and challenge other players for experience points, special items and glory. From town you can enter various wild locations such as the forest, the beach, or mountains, where you can explore and find items or experience points and Miscrits to fight and capture.

Fights are one Miscrit versus another, though you can have a team of up to four Miscrits at a time. Each turn you can use a Miscrit power, an item or switch to another Miscrit. If you’re fighting another trainer, the trainer can also switch out Miscrits; the battle isn’t over until all Miscrits from one side have been eliminated. Otherwise, battles with wild Miscrits are over once you’ve defeated or captured the single Miscrit.

Captures have a percentage of succeeding, depending on the life and level of the enemy Miscrit, and you can only attempt so many captures in a given period of time. Once captured, the Miscrit joins your team and you can train and level him like any other Miscrit you have. Winning battles can earn you experience points, items, and other bonuses.

Individual Miscrits don’t benefit from battle, and instead you, the trainer, gain experience points with each battle. Every time you level, you gain “Training Points” which can be spent to level individual Miscrits. Initially, it costs just one point to raise a Miscrit one level, but the cost increases as the Miscrit reaches higher level. Training points can be gained not just through leveling, but also random events like the wishing well, and through purchase, allowing players to speed up their training by paying for it if they wish.

As Miscrits levels they gain new powers every three levels and evolve to mightier forms every 10 levels. On top of this, each of the hundreds of Miscrits fall into one of three types : Fire, Water or Nature. Fire attacks do more damage to Nature Miscrits, Nature has a bonus against Water, and Water has a bonus against Fire, so the choice of Miscrit during a battle is critical and can entirely change the outcome of a battle.

However, higher level Miscrits also gain special physical attacks, that do the same damage regardless of the element type of the enemy Miscrit. The combination of all these factors means that with hundreds of Miscrits and many choices to make in the leveling of a Miscrit, the strategy in choosing, training and battling is nuanced, with no one perfect path. This level and depth of strategy is uncommon in social games and holds potential for Miscrits as a competitive game.

For being a relatively new game, Miscrits is well put together with no major bugs, hiccups or slowdown issues. The art and music seem a little weak at times, but the amount of thought put into the gameplay and balance makes Miscrits more than enjoyable. Throughout the game you can see many placeholders for content to come, including special attacks and new areas to explore, showing Broken Bulb’s intent to improve Miscrits in the coming months. Apart from multiplayer battles, there aren’t many social aspects to Miscrits, but one might well also expect dueling and visiting friends’ homes in the future, as well as other features.

Speaking of battles, Broken Bulb has set the stage for an interesting fight with Monster Galaxy, which launched just over a month ago and has quickly grown to over 4.6 million monthly active users. Miscrits, with less than three weeks under its belt, has reached about half a million MAU. Although we expect that other monster collection games will be launched in response to the success of these two, their development will take several months; in the meantime, both of these games are growing fast.

Sony Online Entertainment’s latest Facebook title, Catch a Killer, puts players in the shoes of a rookie forensic investigator, solving murders and kidnappings by combing crime scenes for clues and leads in a game based on James Patterson’s Alex Cross novel series. It’s also reminiscent of CSI: Crime City, although given the subject matter, this comparison may be inevitable. Catch a Killer is a fun single player experience and uses old mechanics in novel ways, but ends up being more linear than one might expect from a crime solving game.

As a novice investigator you initially report to Alex Cross, as he guides you and helps you solve the first cases. The primary goal, solving crimes, is completed in several discrete steps called “Investigate”, “Examine”, “Forensics” and “Results”.

Performing each step consumes energy, restricting how fast you can progress through the game, unless you purchase more energy points or have it gifted to you. Each step must be performed in sequence, and throughout the course of a case you’ll go through each of these steps in sequence several times. The faster each step is completed, the more experience points and sometimes energy points you receive.

The first step, investigation, takes you to the crime scene, where you’re given a list of items to find and click on. As you click each item, it’ll disappear from the scene. An incorrect click leaves you unable to click on any items for a short period. You get a hint every 20 seconds or so, which helps you find the next item on the list. Once you’ve found all items, one or more items will be identified as evidence and taken to the lab to be examined.

The second step, examination, involves taking the evidence found from the scene and scouring it for clues in a two step process. First, you’re given a UV lamp, magnifying glass and brush to find clues. The UV lamp can reveal fluids, the magnifying glass shows hairs and text, and the brush can uncover fingerprints. Once a clue is identified, you have to gather the clue by swabbing fluids, tweezing hairs, photographing text or using lifting tape on the fingerprints.

The last step, forensics, can be one of a few tasks depending on what you found in examination. If you found a hair or a fluid, you’ll analyze the DNA by trying to find a specific sequence of colors in a scrolling line of color sequences.

If it was a fingerprint, you’ll fill in missing pieces of the fingerprint by clicking possible matches and seeing if they fit, like a puzzle. If you found text information, you’ll perform an interview which simply consists of reading and clicking potential responses. Once you’ve completed this step, the case will be done, or you’ll have to go back to investigation and repeat the process. Oftentimes this series will be repeated three times before a case is closed.

Much of Catch a Killer feels like an old fashioned point and click adventure like Myst. As you go through cases a story starts to develop, with serial perpetrators and interviews with recurring characters. Given the relative depth of the storyline, many of the social aspects included in the game feel somewhat tacked on, and largely irrelevant to the game and its design.

For example, you can customize your avatar and office space, but outside of the customization and visiting the “City” to chat, you never see your avatar or office. You can also visit your friends, but again, their homes have nothing to do with the storylines or cases.

With weak social elements, playing Catch a Killer is a game of cat and mouse, looking for clues and finding information to solidify a lead. Players get to lead investigations and feel triumphant as they’re able to find and try serial killers and kidnappers; the game’s graphics and writing compel you to venture forward and find out the mystery behind the violence. Ultimately however, the game lays out the exact path you have to take: Catch a Killer is almost entirely linear from beginning to end, and you’re just here to watch.

The first English-language Facebook game by Chinese company 活力飼舍 is Happy Tribe, a title that uses war game mechanics for a primarily player vs player game. Although the graphics and gameplay are generally solid, the play experience is marred by poor localization and lack of documentation.

Happy Tribe combines mechanics Facebook RPGs such as Crime City and Mafia Wars, along with elements from strategy games like Starcraft or Command and Conquer. Gameplay involves harvesting resources, building your village, training warriors, casting spells, defeating invaders, and eventually attacking or defending yourself from other players and collecting taxes from the defeated.

The primary resources of Happy Tribe are food, population, magic, and combat power. Going in order, food is required to build, population determines your maximum number of warriors, magic is used in spells and combat power determined how strong your army and warriors are. Generally, the majority of the single player game is spent waiting for your production buildings to complete their production cycles, as there are no other tasks to accomplish. There isn’t much of a shortage of resources, and in the early levels you’re primarily bottlenecked by a lack of production buildings, which you can’t build more of until later levels.

In building your city, “cruel natives” and other wild fauna will appear around your village, threatening your safety and well-being. While these threats don’t actually attack you, you can fight them off and collect experience, food, and rare items from them. Fighting them consumes a certain number of combat power points, which you’ll have to rebuild later.

Spells in Happy Tribe are cast from special buildings such as temples and ziggurats. These buildings not only require food to build, but also require rare resources such as giant skulls and wood to complete. Players can find these through killing natives and some other special in-game promotions, and can also purchase them with premium credits, costing real money. More spells are available as you build higher level buildings and do tasks like destroying enemy warriors or summoning great beasts for you to defeat and collect resources from.

The player vs player and only real social aspect of the game is shallow at best, and only allows you the ability to attack and steal from your friends.  Unlike Crime City or Mafia Wars where you’re given a list of random players you can attack, you can only attack other players you’ve added as friends.  Upon initiating an attack, you simply allocate a number of warriors to the attack and hope it works out.  Once a village is defeated, you can tax it to gain resources as well as “tease” the subjugated player, which earns you additional food and publishes the humiliation on his wall.  You’re also able to liberate friends who have been conquered, sometimes will fight off people trying to attack you, but without the ability to formalize alliances or send resources, your only real way of interacting with other players is through combat.

The gameplay of Happy Tribe is simple enough, but the poorly done localization makes the game much harder to play than it should.  In some cases, the mechanics of the game aren’t explained clearly or at all, leaving some large amount of trial and error to determine how to play the game.  Apart from translation and writing issues, the “cruel natives” of the game fit the cutesy atmosphere but could inspire some ire, especially from US audiences, for being drawn in blackface.

All in all, Happy Tribe is a simple player vs player game where you gather resources, build your village and attack your friends.  While simple enough to pick up and play, the flaws in localization make the game more difficult and less enjoyable than it might be otherwise.

Paradise Life is a new Facebook social game released by Icebreak Games, developers of the successful Cafe Life. The new title does an effective job of reverse engineering the mechanics that have made FrontierVille and now CityVille into hits, but with small additions that should help make the game do well in its own right.

You start off on a small island teeming with trees, plants, and debris to clean up. There are fish to catch, grass, plants and rocks to clear out, as well as trees to chop for lumber and various kinds of trash. In the process of clearing out your land, you sometimes run into wild animals that require chasing off before you can continue clear-cutting your island.

Apart from those island game features, the basics of Paradise Life boil down to farming. You have crops to plant and harvest, and can nurture animals and trees, consuming energy for every action.  Both income and experience points come from performing these actions, as well as doingquests.

The building mechanics that are now standard to many sims are also present, with the completion of some buildings tied to special items gifted by friends or bought with “shells”, the premium currency in Paradise Life that can only be purchased with Facebook credits.

The social aspect of Paradise Life are also fully fleshed out, with a parallel leveling system fueled by “Favor”, points of which are collected when you visit neighbors and help out around their islands. You can also “hire” a neighbor to complete tasks on your farm, with the amount of work they do determined by favor levels.

There are also the traditional social mechanics of sending or trading gift items with friends to complete buildings and item sets.  For now, Paradise Life is also saturated with pop-ups asking you to publish whatever action you just performed.

Additional features make Paradise Life truly feel like an island-based version of FrontierVille. Debris and wild plants and trees continue to appear randomly as you play, requiring you to expend energy removing them on a daily basis. You also have a chance of uncovering special “collection” items while harvesting or clearing out your land. If you manage to gather all pieces of a collection item “set”, then you get an extra bonus consisting of resources and a special decorative item. If you’re out of energy, you can also buy energy with “food points” that are earned when you collect crops and fruit.

One FrontierVille-inspired feature that hasn’t appeared in many games since is the family. In Paradise Life’s menu bar is an option to view “My Family”, which shows a family tree with empty spots for a spouse and some children.  Of course, this mechanic originally appeared in the SNES title Harvest Moon, which allows you to find a mate to help out around the farm and eventually produce offspring, who also grow up to assist in the daily chores.

The look of Paradise Life is very much cute, simple, and colorful. The graphics give a bright, warm feeling to the game, and nothing looks out of place. There don’t seem to be any noticeable issues with the game, apart from it being sometimes difficult to click on certain items when you are doing a series of actions.

Altogether, Paradise Life has made many improvements to now-standard farming and island mechanics game without becoming overly complex or hard to learn. So far it’s doing well, having picked up 254,121 monthly active users since launching in late November.

In a social gaming landscape saturated with farms, cities, and mobsters, TipCat Interactive’s new release Zombie Party appears at first to be a novel experience, putting you in a wasteland infested with myriad zombies with only improvised weapons as a defense. In actuality, the gameplay of Zombie Party doesn’t much resemble either a party or zombie survival; it’s actually closer to the traditional resource collection and item building of other Facebook social games, with zombies presenting no real threat.

Zombie Party starts in a house with you, a weapons engineer, and several pieces of equipment that manufacture and store zombicidal weapons. The initial quests show you how to begin fighting the undead menace by researching new technologies, creating weapons, and erecting barricades and zombie lures.

You consume items like wood, rubber bands, stones, and rope to research cutting-edge weapons such as banana catapults, slingshots and crossbows. These “ingredients” can be found as random drops from zombies and rewards for completing quests. You can also purchase random ingredients at high cost from the in-game shop, or gift and trade with other players.

When ready, you can construct any of your researched items at “Production Machines”. These machines can produce items in varying amounts, but the more you want at a time, the longer it takes and the more it costs per weapon.  As you level, you can also construct more machines to increase your weapon production capabilities.

To begin eradicating the undead, you can assign light weapons to your employees, mount heavy weapons around the house, or place traps for hapless zombies to wander over. You gain experience points and zombie coins for every zombie you destroy, along with random drops of extra coins and weapon ingredients.

These zombies, unlike their counterparts in movies, seem to have interest in nothing except lawn ornaments called “Attractions”. Initially, you’re only capable of erecting “Pumpkinheads”, which attract normal zombies but as you level you’ll be able to construct more ornate attractions like the roulette table that attracts the stronger businessman zombies.

When a zombie sees an attractor relevant to its interests, it’ll shamble towards the attraction and beat upon it until either the zombie or the attractor is destroyed. If an attraction takes too much damage, it’ll break down and stop attracting zombies until the player fixes it for a small percentage of its original cost.

Aside from attractions and production machines, you can also add plants and other foliage to your yard. Besides the obvious utility of beautifying your lawn, plants obstruct the movement of zombies, allowing you to herd zombies and otherwise impede their movement, which gives your avatars more time to shoot them down. You can also customize the floor and walls of your house, as well as your own clothing and coloring, though these changes are purely cosmetic.

As in every Facebook sim, you’re encouraged to visit your friends and assist them in miscellaneous tasks. You can also trade ingredients, as well as request or send gifts. As you level, you can recruit more of your friends to help destroy zombies at your house, though currently there are no player attributes, leaving no reason to pick one friend over another. Accumulating more friends does unlock special items, though.

Zombie Party is a recent release, and so lacks polish and a smooth gaming experience. In addition to lag issues, clicking on specific items becomes difficult as the screen fills with more zombies and goodies. The game also seems to total up your zombie coins incorrectly, sometimes resulting in the total shown being significantly different from what you actually have. The localization is noticeably rough in a few dialogue boxes, and in general the game expresses some inconsistent behavior in how zombies appear, items appear, and in how quests resolve.

The actual gameplay may leave some dissatisfied as well; though it looks like a zombie game, Zombie Party plays more like a restaurant sim like Cafe World than Plants vs Zombies, with most of your time going to tending to production machines that fabricate weapons and harvesting the zombies that wander into your range of fire.

But Zombie Party may satisfy other players by sticking to the style of other popular games. Zombie Party’s art and gameplay have room to improve, but with its trendy theme and resemblance to popular titles, it could do well.

Gaia Online, the creator of a virtual world for teens and young adults, has had more success than most in its genre. But following a round of layoffs in November, the company has signaled what may be a new plan for the future with the release of a Facebook RPG called Monster Galaxy.

Inspired by monster-collection games like Pokemon or Digimon, Monster Galaxy starts you off as a trainer with one monster, called a “Moga”. Your goal is to wander the land and capture more Moga, while completing quests and leveling up. Doing so requires items, monsters’ unique powers and attributes, and help from other characters.

The design budget for Monster Galaxy appears to have been larger than the average Facebook game, with well drawn characters and monsters, detailed landscapes and epic music for every occasion. The story is also more prominent than in some Facebook RPGs; although knowingly predictable, with a quest to defeat the big, bad evil and your childhood nemesis, it also has a tongue-in-cheek way of playing up a lot of tropes.

The gameplay doesn’t deviate much from other monster training games. Unlike games that involve collecting gold or resources and building cities or buying armor, you really only have your monsters, called “Moga”. You can carry up to three “Moga” with you at a time, though you can capture up to 120 Moga total using “Star Seeds”.

From the beginning, you’re assigned quests which generally require you to go to a certain location or to defeat a certain number of wild Moga. While traveling the overland map, you’ll also randomly run into wild Moga and other enemies and engage them in combat. In battle, you choose one of your three Moga to start the fight, and during each battle turn you can use one of your Moga’s attacks, use an item, swap Moga, or run. All Moga belong to a Zodiac sign, and this sign determines the relative effectiveness of the Moga’s special attack in a straightforward rock-scissors-paper fashion.

Capturing Moga still involves a fight; once they’re critically damaged, they can be trapped with Star Seeds. The chance of capturing the Moga seems to depend on the damage done, your level, and the rarity of the enemy Moga. If instead you defeat enemy Mogas normally, you’re rewarded with experience points and a chance of finding more Star Seeds. As your Moga gain experience points and level, they grow stronger, but there’s currently no way to customize their growth. Also, enemy Moga grow in strength quite quickly as you progress in the game, requiring time spent grinding levels.

At “Your House” you can swap Moga and let them take naps to fully restore hp and skills. The recovery time for each Moga depends on its level; the higher the level, the longer it’ll take. However, while your Moga are napping, you’re free to swap them out with other Moga you’ve captured, so you can continue your journey without interruption and level other Mogas. If you’re impatient for a particular Moga to revive, you can also use a Blue Coffee item to instantly restore him to full health.

Monster Galaxy is currently lacking in any strong multiplayer or microtransaction incentives for the players, and doesn’t play much like other social games. You can purchase “Star Coins” with real money, which in turn can be used to buy Blue Coffee and Star Seeds to make your game a little easier, but having a lot of those isn’t required to continue. You can visit your friends’ houses and collect Whistles that help you launch special attacks in battle, but those also aren’t necessary. This ends up making the game a pretty level playing field for all players, and in the end the players who play the smartest and play the most will have progressed further than other players.

Having just launched,Monster Galaxy also still has some kinks and bugs to work out. The longer your session runs, the more the game starts to lag, until you reload the page. The UI will often misreport the probability of an attack hitting, or whether your attack will do extra damage or less damage, and sometimes leveling up a monster that just finished napping will put the monster back into a nap. While annoying, the bugs don’t detract much from the gameplay and experience.

At the end of the day, Monster Galaxy feels like a simple, if grindy, single player RPG, where it’s just you versus the world. Given the setup of the game, it can probably be expected that a PvP area will be added in due course, as well as purchasable enhancements for your Moga. But even as-is Monster Galaxy stands as a relatively unique experience among current Facebook titles, with its reliance on story and apparent disdain for forcing players to spend money or push invites to friends.