Monumental Failure

I'll be straight with you: I cover shooters, so a monument-building physics party game is not my usual Tuesday. But I've sat through enough couch sessions to know when something is genuinely funny versus when developers just slapped the word 'wacky' in the trailer and hoped for the best. Monumental Failure earns most of its laughs honestly, and that counts for something. The core loop is deceptively simple. You control a small crew of ancient builders and your job is to maneuver heavy stone sections into position to reconstruct real-world monuments: Stonehenge, the Roman aqueducts, the Great Pyramid, Easter Island heads, and others spread across seven worlds totaling around 70 levels. The tools at your disposal are the absurd part. Trampolines, jetpacks, slingshots, cranes, ski slopes. Two control inputs total, right stick and left stick on a controller, plus a confirm button to lock a piece. That is genuinely the entire control scheme. The low floor for input complexity is intentional, and it works well enough for pulling non-gamers into split-screen without a ten-minute tutorial. The multiplayer structure is where the game has actual range. Local co-op supports two to four players working together, there is a split-screen competitive mode for the same player count, and a team competitive mode that can technically seat up to ten players across four teams. On paper that team mode sounds like a party game highlight reel. In practice it depends heavily on having the right crowd and enough controllers. The physics do what physics do in these games: they betray you at the worst possible moment. A block sails off the edge of a platform, a builder falls off a ledge and becomes basically useless for the rest of the round, and your Stonehenge ends up looking like a post-earthquake disaster zone. The judges at the end of each level are era-appropriate gods, which is a nice touch. Venus critiquing your lopsided aqueduct does not get old the first few times. Single player is harder to defend. Controlling multiple builders alone across split keyboard inputs is clumsy and not particularly fun. The game does not have the mechanical depth to carry a solo session for long, and the content runs thin faster than you would like. Reviewers at launch flagged a few bugs and a lack of in-level guidance that could tip frustration levels past the point where the physics comedy pays off. The macOS situation is also worth noting: the game is incompatible with macOS Catalina and above, so Mac buyers should check their OS version before purchasing. The Windows and Linux builds run fine on modern modest hardware. Bottom line on the persona fit: if you came here looking for netcode, ranked modes, or any kind of online play, wrong game entirely. This is a local-only experience designed for a single screen and people in the same room. As a short-session couch game it delivers genuine laughs, especially in co-op or team versus. As anything else it struggles to justify its running time.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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