The Cabin Factory (Various)

 

The Cabin Factory (PC, Switch, Xbox One & Series, Playstation 4 & 5) :

This is a game I only found out existed today while watching Mr. SteJ's morning stream, but after watching him play, I headed straight over to Steam to pay the very reasonable price of £1.86 to enjoy it's random spookyness for myself!

You take on the role of a Cabin Inspector at a factory that designs horror cabins for the movie and theme park industries, and it's your job to find out if each cabin is currently haunted or clear of spooks! Sounds simple enough, right!?

Well lets just say it becomes apparent very quickly, that there's a little more to this story, but because of the nature of the game and it's short length, it's probably best to say very little about what takes place once you get into the cabins themselves....

Once you exit the cabin, it's a simple push of a button to say whether or not it was filled with spooks, and then the next cabin will be brought along on a conveyor belt for you to check.

Taking it's cues from the many, many horror-themed walking sims that have come before it, The Cabin Factory still manages to put enough cool scares into the game, and surround it with a suitably spooky story that makes it worth way more than the asking price!  

If this still doesn't convince you that it's worth your time and money, well maybe this clip from Mr. SteJ's stream this morning will convince you instead...

(** LOUDNESS WARNING!!!**)

Once you finish a day of work, you'll get to go and test more cabins to see all the 'anomalies' (scares) and try and collect all the achievements, which helps give the game a bit more longevity and replayability....and also gives more clues as to the deeper story behind it all...

Go pick it up! It's super cheap, and perfect for Halloween!

*~*

War of the Monsters (PS2/PS4)

 

War Of The Monsters (PS2/PS4) :

Big giant monsters! Ever since King Kong climbed the Empire State Building and Godzilla first rose up from the sea, huge creatures have been stomping all over our on-screen cities. Naturally it wasn't long before such creatures met up to battle each other to find out who was the best, and cause even more destruction! Once video games appeared on the scene, they also didn't wait very long before giving us control over these mega-sized monsters! 

This game then is similar to a few other monster beat-em-ups, but it is a very good example of the genre! There are eight characters unlocked at the start of the game, with a few more available to unlock. These characters will look fairly familiar to any fan of the aforementioned sci-fi flicks too, with a giant ape, a giant lizard, a huge robot...you get the idea! The game knows it's target audience and knows what they'll want to see!

Once you've listened to the 50's style music, watched the spinning newspapers of the intro and picked your favourite monster, you can play against a friend in fully 3D environments, smashing buildings, picking up cars or sharp pointy pieces of metal to throw at them, and using your characters unique abilities (radioactive breath, for example) to defeat the other player. You can also add an extra couple of fighters, although sadly these can only be computer controlled. If you can't find anybody else to play with, there is a fairly decent solo mode too, with the added feaature of slightly smaller monsters to battle in between the big fights!

The environments are pretty cool, often hiding little discoverable easter eggs such as extra weapons to use, and the way the buildings fall apart and add more things to lob at your opponent is pretty cool. There are apparently also a few mini-games to unlock, but I've never managed to unlock any of these yet, so can't really comment on those.

It all makes for a pretty enjoyable, suitably sci-fi, beast-filled brawler that's a bit of a hidden gem on Playstation 2. It took me a while to find a copy, but Im really glad I did, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a slightly unusual addition to their collection of fighting games!