13 Wishes - Monster High is not worth playing. Avoid buying it for the sake of your own money. Purchase DVDs instead or invest in dogecoin, but avoid purchasing 13 Wish if you are determined to spend money on something meaningless.
The game takes place before the Monster High movie and recap it's plot, but it has a different story that puts you in the main character's shoes. There are two modes: single player where you control a character, or multiplayer with one person as the on-screen player, and one assisting off-screen.
We've played the game Monster High: 13 Wishes for more than is legal, and we came up with the following 13 things that should happen if a genie ever grants us a baker's dozen.
1.The game feels like it was produced only to be able to market the new Monster High franchise, rather than produce a worthwhile video game.
2.The world doesn't need to be so large. The majority of the game is just open space that takes a long time to get through, with three different textures doing the work of all of the geometry. Characters are slow to begin with and it is also difficult to move around this much space.
3.The goals in this game are too vague for kids - there is no guidance on how to engage with the text and it is unclear what key objectives each stage requires or even how to get back to the menu. The challenges of each stage need to be explicitly communicated, rather than relying on intuition.
4. We wish the enemies actually had AI - Every single enemy is braindead.
5.Combat doesn’t have any physical contact, which is confusing and a little problematic. The issue stems from the character not being able to jump on the enemy or punch them. The character animates without ever touching the bot at all, which might be more realistic from a distance but feels weird when near an enemy.
6.I wish the presentation wasn't so dead - It honestly looks like a Nintendo 64 game. That's a well-worn insult often flung at crap-looking WiiWare games, but here is no exaggeration. Add a fuzzy filter to these screenshots, and you would not be able to distinguish it from any of the hojillion other collect-a-thon platformers on that console. Hitting the wall with the camera causes some textures to disappear momentarily. The stage distance is better, but enemies and items pop in alarmingly close. The Wii U has less power than PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, sure, but man...
7.The controls feel stiff and unresponsive. It makes players agitated.
8.It would be better if they could switch up the objectives. You need to accomplish a certain number of things in each stage to progress to the next level. It's okay to not complete every one, but you'll want to do most of them.
9.Boss battles are not engaging because they are stupid. One battle involves teleporting across three platforms and waiting for the boss to fly overhead and dive in one of them. The boss doesn't target you, it just incapacitated itself on a platform for no reason. Fighting this boss is laughable if it weren't so bad.
10.The school where all the levels are set is a giant mass of nothing but classrooms with no instruction or advanced hints. You were left to your own devices in navigating the halls until you finally found the level. If you're attempting to find a new set of levels, it is too difficult to find amongst the pop-in and lack of advanced clues.
11.We wish the multiplayer wasn't dumb. Player 2 can point a Wii Remote around the screen to move in an assist mode. Somehow, even this works poorly, as the pointer aggressively locks on to targets. It's not like we're looking for surgical precision, but some finesse in selecting what we're pointing at would be nice!
