Backyard Monsters is a Facebook game that mixes strategy elements with tower defense and, of course, social gaming. And if you think that such a combination is not possible, think again, since Casual Collective’s game is up and running and promising to get bigger and bigger because all of us wish to have their own critter farms and attack neighbors, right?

Backyard Monsters is most likely unique on Facebook at the moment of writing – I haven’t seen a similar game yet and trust me, I’ve played quite a few! And that’s clearly a bonus, even though the game’s description might make you think that we’re talking about a regular strategy/war game: you have to design your base, gather resources, build a monster army and attack other players. Easy enough for you? Well, it’s a bit more complex than it might sound at first!

You start with 7 days of protection, enough time to build your base and at least try to be prepared when thrown into the wild: you will first have to construct your resource gathering structures, then some defensive towers to help you fight against the wild monsters that will attack you from time to time and finally some monster hatcheries to create your own critter army. And even if you’ll consider that you’ve done everything by the book, you’ll most likely realize that once your protection is over, you’ll have to redesign your base and reconsider your strategy. And that, as strange as it might sound, it’s a good thing!

Because attacking players has a logical downside: players can attack you too and in Backyard Monsters it seems that this happens quite often. When it comes to getting attacked, you’ll have a few towers defending your structures (but not your own monsters whose sole purpose is that of attacking the other players). However, their number is limited, so you’ll have to place them in strategic areas, where you think that the other player will attack. You can also build additional defensive structures like blocks of wood and stone to slow down the enemy army and protect your resources.

Because the resources are the main thing you need in Backyard Monsters: in order to become a better player and have a more powerful army, you’ll have to spend tons of resources on upgrading everything in your Yard. But what to upgrade first: the towers, to better defend your buildings; your monster locker to research for more monsters; or your resource gathering buildings, to harvest more? It’s your decision and no matter which path you choose, you’ll certainly have fun and realize that, in the end, without an army to pillage and plunder, there’s no fun and no possible way of winning.

Therefore, you’ll start attacking other players for revenge or just to get some extra resources – at least as many as there were stolen from you. In order to do that, you have a map at your disposal and you can view other players’ Yards and decide which would be the best to attack. Unfortunately, there’s no spying process involved, so you might find yourself attacking another broke player just like yourself and gain no extra resources. Or you can strike the jackpot and return home with tons of them – you’ll probably experience both scenarios while playing.

The visuals of the game are really well done and the monsters are really lovable and, overall, even though still in early beta, Backyard Monsters is an amazingly fun, challenging and well done strategy title. It’s not for the peaceful farmers but for the more competitive Facebook users, but it certainly offers just a bit more that your regular “strategy” games on the social platform.

However, in terms of social gameplay the title still lacks some sense: there’s not too much interaction between neighbors at the moment, but that will most likely change in the near future. That and, of course, an update to let us all know the area of attack of our towers!

Have fun playing Backyard Monsters here and don’t forget to share your opinion on the game with us!

7 COMMENTS

  1. first of all, make no mistake that while this game is ostensibly free, the entire thing from one end to the other is engineered to try to frustrate you into spending real money on everything from “speed ups” to it’s excruciatingly slow & resource hogging upgrades to 1,000 Shiny for the 4th worker & then an unannounced doubling of that to 2000 Shiny for the 5th worker. So if you are not used to this kind of gaming chicanery, you might go buy or save 2k shiny (I bought $20 worth of Shiny (3000) and inadvertently spent all of it on the 2 blue dots called “workers” because of this bait and switch tactic). another tidbit buried in these forums is the little gem that people cannot attack you while you are there! They have to attack you behind your back when you are not logged on! Oh but wait! Then can you or does it make automatic repairs for you while you are away? Why of course not! If you are expecting reasonable fairness in this game, forget it! While you can be attacked up to 4 times an hour, any repairs have to wait until you come back and click on the “repair” button, which in my case last time was 7 hours after 2 attacks! Then of course, the higher the level of the resource, the long it takes to repair them, in my case 45 minutes for each tower. Yet another tidbit buried in the forums: This one concerns town hall level 6. if you save the 1.7 miliion in resources to do this upgrade, which takes 4 days (Buy our shiny to speed it up now, y’hear!) and do it because you want more weapons and a significant amount of more blocks to build walls and 10 more mines, forget it, this is a bogus upgrade. All you get for your effort is 5 more mines, 10 more stone blocks and the ablitity to upgrade each silo to level 10. I looked, no where is it published how much of any resources are unlocked on each town hall level . So I’m doing it here: you get an an additional cannon (guy doesn’t know a cannon from this mortar looking thing) and sniper for each level starting at 2 thru 5. you get 1 more of each of the resource generators to purchase on each level, 10 stone block and 20 wood ones and 5 more mines; level 3 you get the guns and one laser and one Tesla tower to purchase and the 10/20 blocks and 5 more mines. Anyway if this is slightly wrong, everything totals out at level 5, the real, true highest level before the scam of level 6 to: 6 each of the pebble polishers, twig snappers etc.; 5 silos; 20 mines; 60 stone block and 140 wood ones; 2 Tesla towers; two laser towers, and six each of the cannon and snipers. cannons and snipers have 5 levels of improvement and the exotic weapons have 3.

  2. how to get a good base:you mostly want to pretect your townhall and storage silo’s put all your resources together and don’t bother putting your hatchereis inside your walls that’s a dumb thing to do. put walls around you town hall(2 layer’s around it stone blocks) put your sniper,cannon,laser and tesla inside the walls you should put boobie traps in spaces where there are no walls and let this be a note to you.^_^

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