Backyard Monsters is a Facebook game made by Casual Collective. This is an odd game that has good features. It combines different styles of play to create an all new playing experience (at least for Facebook, that is).

You take the position of a great monster general who rules his backyard with an iron fist. You must defend your backyard from other players and non-player characters (NPCs), while at the same time expanding and improving your base and attacking rival backyards for total neighborhood dominance.

This game combines two rather popular styles of play. Not only do you have to build your fort to improve your monsters in real-time strategy, but you also have to deploy them in a strategic way against the enemy.

That’s right, you can’t just send an army blindly in as a horde if you want get far in this game. You will have to utilize the various abilities of your monsters in order to get the best chance of victory.

You often see elements of the tower defense style of games. When you are defending your fort, you hope that your cannons will be powerful enough to hold back the enemy monsters. But when you are on the attack, you hope that your monsters are powerful enough to take down the enemies’ cannons.

In general, I find this to be much better in comparison to your usual Facebook game where you are limited to only one game style, which can be lame. The developers seem to be more concerned with sucking money from your wallet than actually giving you a compelling and interesting game.

While this game’s graphics tend to be much prettier than your usual Facebook game like Mafia Wars or Farmville, and the mixture of gaming styles is unique, this game does get old after a little while and does not engage you for long.

You find that you often have to sit around waiting to build up enough resources to actually send out an attack, upgrade buildings, or construct new buildings. It feels like you are watching paint dry sometimes. This game is clearly meant to be very casual where you only check on it maybe once or twice a day.

Overall, I think Backyard Monsters is an excellent combination of older play styles that create a completely new way to play. However, much like many other casual games, Backyard Monsters is not meant to be engaging or suck you in; it is meant to kill time which, as college students, is what we want some of the games to do. In other words, the game does what it’s supposed to do very well.