The Monster Breeder
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About the GameThis is a turn-based fantasy strategy game with RPG elements. The game has two main layers: the first is the monster breeding, the second is the tactical turn-based arena combat.
Main Features
- Create Monsters
- Tactical Arena Combat
- Large variety of tournaments
- Warrior training
- Forging
- Alchemy
- Base upgrading
Players can purchase eggs and juvenile creatures from local hunters. The next step is to set up a magical treatment to enhance the creatures’ strength, agility, and other attributes. Nearly all these traits can be manipulated with magic scrolls, potions, blood infusions and runestones, although overuse of magic and potions can cause severe illness, infertility, shorter lifespan, or even death.
Natural species are weak and perform poorly in the arena, but all have at least one valuable ability. There are three classes of creature available: insect, reptile and carnivora. Players can only crossbreed species within the same class, and the best offspring can then be selected for magic treatments to improve their combat performance. Only eggs and juvenile creatures can be treated. Adult monsters earn experience fighting in the arena and learn new skills when leveling up, but these skills are not inheritable.
There are multiple options for players to house their monsters in the various chambers and cellars of the Old Keep, or they can build a small hut or kennel in the courtyard and upgrade it. Depending on their temperature tolerance, some creatures can live in a flooded dungeon cellar while some others need a warm environment to remain healthy. Only healthy creatures can fight and earn money for their masters.
Combat in the arena is tough but not always deadly. Beginners can participate in non-lethal tournaments without the risk of losing a character or monster. Lethal combat pays much better, but this is a game with permadeath, so be aware!
How much risk are you willing to take? Which tournament are you going to enter? Only you decide. Players get money if they take part in a tournament, but only the winners receive the glory and extra rewards.
Warriors, archers and sorcerers can be hired to fight side-by-side with monsters in the arena. Players can personalize their training and equip them with weapons that match their skills and strength, although to be overburdened with armor comes with serious penalties in combat.
Characters earn experience in the arena and gain new skills when leveling up, and older warriors can be valuable trainers depending on their intelligence and trainer skills. Some hired characters may refuse to participate in lethal tournaments, but slaves can also be trained for combat.
Players need to hire a blacksmith and alchemist to be able to craft items like weapons, armor or potions. Every craftsman has unique skills and traits affecting their products’ quality, their rate of work, and the amount of material they use.
Various types of equipment can be purchased to enhance productivity: recipe books, alembics and extractors are all useful accessories of the alchemist’s lab, while weapon and armor molds, alloy smelters and special forges are exceedingly beneficial to the blacksmith. Apprentices can be hired to improve productivity and players can employ them as blacksmiths or alchemists when they graduate.
Players can construct or upgrade various types of buildings, allowing them to keep more monsters, incubate more eggs, create more weapons and potions, or increase storage capacity and the size of their living quarters.
Some buildings have unique features: Hatchling’s Cabin provides the possibility of using runestones and magic fields to modify juvenile creatures’ traits, while the Alchemist’s Shack and Blacksmith’s Hut provide more places to hire craftsmen and also give an efficiency bonus. The Old Keep is the default building at the beginning of the game. It has multiple chambers and cellars, all of which can be assigned to any purpose.
Game Discussion
Steam User 36
The graphics and UI/UX leave much to be desired, however if you can look past that, there's quite a bit of well thought out mechanics and love in this game that i am thoroughly enjoying.
Would recommend for those into Turn based combat and management & gladiatorial type games
Steam User 35
I was holding off on making a review for this game until it was fully released.
I'm EXTREMELY happy to report that it actually came out. This isn't a developer who kept dragging their feet and pretending to work only to never get their project out. There was consistent and amazing updates. This game getting a full release is actually outstanding and I'm pleased to say the work was all worth it.
Steam User 17
I tried cross breeding guerrilla, and a boar. In the hopes of getting an orc. instead I got creatures that were infertile, would hemorrhage blood at the slightest of breezes, and lived in constant pain.... Next up. What would happen if a wolf, and spider got in on....
The good and the bad.
Story side. there is very little real story. Just realize the world you live in, is rather bleak. Your creatures will be abused. You can own slaves, who'll be your personal blood banks.
The game can be surprisingly difficult. There is no tutorial to speak of, just some tool tips early on. But for the most part. You'll be flying blind.
Matches are strategy turn based.
The game is while technically all about breeding monsters. there's nothing stopping you from relying heavily on a human based team. each in game turn there will be arena matches held. there will be several matches with different rules. Some matches will also be death matches, while others are none death match. Lose a death match, and well your team will be dead. if it was with monsters, some might survive with the tag be dying. Which you can than either be butchered for meat... or saved if you have the research.
Research, to start research you must perform surgery on a single creature that will kill it. This is something that could easily be missed due to the lacking tutorial.
Creature breeding, the main meat of the game. generally there is no limit to breeding, want to cross breed a spider with a boar, to try your hand at making Spider pig!? You can do that! Or maybe you want a dragon and a gorilla to get it on! It's a cool concept, and I love this mechanic of trying to cross breed for the ultimate perfect cell, I mean creature...
The game also has a good amount of options when starting a new game. That will determine how difficult, or fast your game is. So if the games too hard. you can start over. increase rewards from tournaments. Reduce maintenance. and a host of other options. Personally I love when developers give these types of options, and let the player decide how they wish to play.
Graphically the game is dated. But I love this game. Ten ten. Will make more creatures that beg for death... Which they;ll get, when I throw them into death matches as my main form of disposial....
Steam User 6
So, looking at the reviews, most of them are prior to the combat adjustment, so I'm making mine with that in mind.
I have to say, first and foremost, the update really needs to just adjust the stats in the game - or at least give you some kind of big, obvious warning. If you didn't see the update, didn't play the game before, etc, you'd never know; the option is hidden, well, in the options, and is on by default. This is a problem because according to the announcement about it, the game looks at the higher of two skills - skills that you might, otherwise, be intrinsically inclined to raise both of for a defensive character (dodge and parry). This is quite a waste of training and just seems like ... a simple oversight? I don't know.
That being said, it doesn't surprise me; the game is not, well, good at explaining or introducing its systems. Do you like old, convoluted games that require your to RTFM and also go see what other people have said about it just to make sure you're not missing anything? This is one of those games. And the thing is, I like those games. So keep that in mind when reading my review. And what's here is pretty good, but it's also very jank. I don't know - I played Monsterseed on PSX so I'm definitely one of those people who have a very, very high tolerance for jank.
Examples of what I mean:
The moment you start out, the game throws a quest at you. You have enough money to finish this quest without combat, and you realistically probably should go that route, but it's VERY unclear that you need to just exit out of the quest text and wait a turn to be able to get out of combat but complete it easily. There's one option on the quest text (attack) and it could have been very easy to add a secondary, clearer option ("Wait to buy the eggs") or something to make it clearer.
Alchemy is very important, but it's not actually clear what the best path to leveling your alchemist is. Do you just make the easiest potions over and over? Do you make the hardest ones? Which ones, actually, are the 'hardest' ones? Are poisons better than potions? Do apprentices hinder the alchemist's growth? Who knows? Not me!
Blacksmithing feels a little ... out of place? You can get Good gear from tournaments that sometimes are even easy enough for 4 spiked rats to win. Are there better gears? Should you invest in making it? Bet you'd love to know the answers, but none for you.
Speaking of the NPCs, getting 'good' ones is really ... really annoying. Don't bother with low INT ones - they're functionally useless, and will never have a high enough base skill to actually make what you want, so why do they exist? They're literally nothing but a trap for newbies - and junk to take up the rolls for things you might actually want. You can't just go and find someone, you can't pay money to actively recruit... you're just stuck waiting, forever. And if you're in a region where the starting text says something isn't as good - haha. Brother, you listen to that, because I've got a file where my alchemist has gained some 40 skill points and I don't even *have* a blacksmith yet. You want an intelligence over 25? Screw you, no blacksmiths for you.
There's also something to be said that isn't jank per se but personal taste: I *hate* that you have no option to not use slaves. I don't want to. I don't like it. I should be allowed to hire more apprentices or just general workers and pay them. If you know what you're doing it's easy enough to make money to do so, but no - if I want maximum efficiency, if I want to fill up those slots? I can't hire a second alchemist or a couple more apprentices. I HAVE to buy slaves, and that just sits wrong with me.
Upgrades to your facilities aren't really clearly marked as such; books and runestones and scrolls are reusable, but you wouldn't really ... know that? And it's not super intuitive, since other things (ingredients and potions and foods) are one time uses. But they are!
Combat is kinda funny. The update is great, comparatively; I do enjoy knowing I'm going to hit something and it's not gonna be a 2% heck-fest for the next half hour. However, maps are set up oddly in many instances (with one entrance in the enemy's favor) and the enemy will not move until you're within their range; while okay, that's fine for the rogue druids or whatever, it is kind of silly for a bunch of feral panthers, you know? It feels bad. At least the update did make my human characters feel better - I can actually hit things, and depending on the current level of my monsters, they actually can do significantly more damage. I know they'll age out eventually, but still. Nice. It gets a thumbs up.
The UI is uh. It's something. It feels like something out of the early 2000s, maybe older. It's messy, unintuitive, requires too many clicks... Like, in order to buy something, you click it, then you click another box and input your number, then click again to put it into your cart. Then you keep doing that until you're done, then you click buy. Except all of these buttons are spread across the whole screen, and it just feels like it's fighting you. There's a reason why shopping sites have little cart icons and let you adjust values while you're putting things IN the cart, you know?
Combat controls are ... weird too. You move the camera with the LMB, but you also LMB to select a character. If you LMB anywhere after selecting, you immediately unselect ... Right click is how you action. It feels messy? I'm constantly unselecting. Maybe that's just a me thing.
If you're someone who enjoys your monsters and doesn't want to view them as fodder - this game isn't for you. Go play Monster Rancher 2 DX. All your monsters are fodder. You have no choice - even if you have a max lifespan, the stupid damage capacity will get you. Having a lifetime damage cap does supply another stat to raise, I guess, sure, but I don't like it. I don't even have a good ... I don't know, critique for it - I just Think It's Bad. Your monster is already limited in usefulness if it has low stats, and it's limited in time by lifespan. Now you gotta get punished for -checks notes- using it?
But, all that being said--
I still like this game? It's jank. It's weird. It *feels* far older than it actually is. But the monsters are weird little goobers, and I appreciate the work the dev has done to make them 'mush' appropriately. I think the breeding system is interesting - using organs to improve certain traits at the expense of lifespan, then bringing lifespan back up,... it's satisfying! I wouldn't recommend you play with the inbreeding penalty (because like, they're magical abominations, it makes no sense, but also mechanically it's just a waste of time to have to breed out another gen or two or whatever it is to ... inevitably back breed into your main line). I think the combat change made the battles more fun and less frustrating. And I like seeing number go up. Brain go brrrr.
It's an excellent concept. There's still a ton here to mess around with and figure out. I like it. I respect what the dev has accomplished here. I wish Steam had a "maybe" button for recommends - because you need a high jank tolerance and a high weird tolerance to like this game, but if you *do* dig through the rough edges, there's a pretty little crystal in the middle. I wouldn't call it a diamond, but I'd call it far more hours than I've gotten out of some other weird little things in my library. Do I think it's worth $30? Not really. I bought it in EA and don't remember how much I paid. But I'd definitely say it's worth $15, maybe even $20 - if you're the kind of person who can chew on it.
Steam User 6
Recommended, with some caveats.
I'm definitely enjoying the game. There's some great ideas executed well, but there are also some ideas executed poorly. Needs some QoL improvements (especially with regards to UI, being able to sort/organize lists of the creatures you're breeding by stat, etc). Quests are highly simplistic and I'd like to see them expanded. The blacksmithing system seems out of place and doesn't seem to really touch on the creature breeding at all, whereas alchemy (a sister system) has tons to do with breeding the creatures. Some mechanical tie-ins would help. Etc, etc, etc.
This game is enjoyable, but it also has bits and moments which make you want to delete it. I hope the dev continues to support and improve the game because with some more work and filing off the rough edges this could be a real gem.
Steam User 6
this is the sort of game ive dreamed about, i love games about hybrids, like hybrid animals, but that was the only game about hybrids that i had found until i found this, and this has monsters, AND their close enough to biologically plausible! its all of it! i love it! 10 outta 10! and please, f there are any other games about hybrids, even if its just a background feature, tell me it!
Steam User 5
Great Game for People that like Min/Maxing, Taming and having Pets.
A game i always wanted.