Review: Freaky Creatures
Written on Jan 3, 2010 by Brian and filed under Reviews
Freaky Creatures offers a world of online competitive battle play that’s combined with social networking and offline action figures. Designed for kids 8 and older, the Freaky Creatures universe lets players customize their creature with attributes and special powers before heading off to battle. There’s even a mobile interface, expanding the world beyond just the PC.
Getting Started
Anyone can play online with a free demo account. But to get the most out of the system, buying a starter pack is the way to get going. The starter packs include two creatures to begin interacting with, along with a random assortment of virtual parts, powers and lair objects. The starter pack also comes with a 1GB flash drive with a link to create your account and download the full application.
One key note though, inside the package is a unique key to activate your account online. When setting ours up, we inadvertently tossed the paper with the code on it. The Freaky Creatures support staff was helpful though. Less than a day after our initial support email, we had a code and were ready to go.
Once you create an account, you’ll need to download and install the desktop application. Once that’s complete you’re ready to customize your first creature. Freaky Creatures says there are over 3.2 billion possible combinations. We’re inclined to believe them; I only got to one billion and got tired of counting.
Freaky Creatures also sells booster packs that include an action figure, 25 creature parts, 10 creature powers and 2 lair objects. You can earn these sorts of upgrades within the games too, but adding the booster packs is the fastest, and most fun if you’re into the offline action figure play. The universe is also perpetually expanding via content updates that include things like rare powers, that will help differentiate your creature from others.
After your first creature is ready though, it’s time to do battle, or if you’re more social, there’s plenty to do with the other creatures roaming about. The game has a lot to offer in terms of both social and competitive aspects, with tournaments, leaderboards and team formation.
Battle Time
There’s a ton to do the Creepy Creatures world, well several worlds to be accurate, but the most common is going to be the battle areas. In these zones players can invite other players to a battle. Winning battles gives you credits, powers and eventually lets your creature be upgraded, giving you addition defense capabilities.
The pairing of battles is pretty easy, click on the creature you want to fight and there’s a red challenge button to get going. Within the battle, players select a style of attack, head, back, left arm, right arm, tail. Each attack has a special style associated with it, fire for instance. Players also have access to special powers that do things like give additional damage to the opponent or repair your own health.
The battles are fought by turns, each player getting to execute an attack. The battle progresses until only one remains standing.
Battles are a lot of fun and while this game is generally designed for kids 8 and up, we had kids as young as 6 having fun. Granted, there’s a certain degree of strategy that older kids will understand better, but there’s still fun to be had for a wide age range – that includes parents. Even I had fun getting a few fights in while our testers weren’t paying attention.
Aside from fighting though, there are other things to do. Players can work on their Lair, build additional creatures, play mini-games online and even partake in a little fishing as seen below.
Bottom Line
In all honesty, we get propositioned by companies like the one behind Freaky Creatures with some degree of frequency to review their products. And generally, we’re less than excited because more times than not, the online games are so poorly done, it’s a waste of our time.
This time though, not only was the game not bad, it was actually surprisingly well done. The figures are well made too. The online game offers a lot of depth and the most popular parts, like battles, are well executed and don’t get boring after repeated play.
The figures are well priced too, starter packs are $19.99 and add-on packs run $9.99 and up. After 30 days, there is a service charge to keep playing the premium version of the game though. A monthly Premium Pass for Freaky Creatures costs $6.99; a three month Premium Pass costs $17.97 and a six month Premium Pass costs $32.94.
Even so, if your kids enjoy playing the game, there appears to be enough value to justify the monthly fees. The game isn’t exactly educational, but it’s a lot of fun and well thought out.
Rating – 4 out of 5 stars
Freaky Creature packs are available via Amazon.com.
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