Hands on with Monster Lab DS

If you woke up one morning and discovered you'd turned into a mad professor, what is the first thing you'd do? Well, if you were taking inspiration from most of the monster films released over the last 50 years, you'd probably turn your hand at inventing some sort of monster. It seems to be the done thing. And it's exactly what you get to do in DS game, Monster Lab.

Playing as an apprentice professor who lives in the world of Uncanny Valley, you can visit your laboratory for a spot of monster part slotting together whenever you fancy. At the start of the game, this is performed beneath the ever-watchful Professor Fuseless, but later new laboratories and professor teachers become available to visit.

While early on your lab only makes it possible to craft mechanical monster parts from the various ingredients you've gathered in the game, later there's an alchemical and then biological laboratory at your disposal, ensuring your monster creating can become really inventive. In fact, using all of the different monster part ingredients to build body parts, then combining these body parts to make monsters results in over one hundred million combinations of monster. That's quite a lot.

Building monsters then playing as them is at the centre of Monster Lab. It's like collecting Pokémon, but with gathering their individual components instead of their whole selves. Actually, what it's probably most like is Spore – a game that also lets you craft your central characters out of parts – which we also played on DS recently. But Monster Lab is visually much different to that game. Instead of bright colours and happy lands, here everything looks more like something straight out of the mind of Tim Burton. Everything from the humorous cut-scenes to the world you explore on your quest to find new ingredients is pretty and cartoon-like, sure, but also dark and twisted just to fit with the monster feel.

There is a point to building monsters that goes beyond simply making them look pretty. When you go into the Monster Creation screen, you're confronted with hundreds of body parts and each one carries with it a specific movement or attack. Monster Lab's fights are all turn-based, and done in quite a unique way using these parts. On your turn, you can select any part of your monster's body, then select one of its attacks from a sub-menu.

So during our time with the game, our monster could ground pound with his torso, do a diagonal chop with one of his arms, or gnaw or produce an optical beam with his head. The better your body parts, the stronger your attacks and the first monster to fall to pieces is the loser.

After a fight, you visit a repair screen to mend your creature who could well be left with no head or legs after a fight. This is done through a mini-game, like much of the rest of the game. These mini-games crop up for you to win new ingredients from during the game, and they also determine how good a body part is you're making in the lab. So you might want to combine a bent screw and a metal platter you've found while scouting for bits to make a new leg in the laboratory. This then triggers a mini-game where you weld the metal together on the touchscreen, following a line as closely as possible. The better you do, the better the strength and quality of the new body part – a neat touch.

There's also added strategies to think about in fights. Using moves consumes battery power and once that's gone you'll need to use a turn recharging. Also, like a standard RPG enemy monsters have a level ranking and more powerful examples are tough to beat (they can be dodged if you don't want to fight, though).

Finally, with ten slots to save monsters to the idea is to carefully choose your best creation for each individual quest or level. In the level we experienced, the town mayor asked us to find and fight the monsters in town in preparation for a visitor who was arriving. Then we had to greet the visitor and play some mini-games to get him safely to the mayor.

With six worlds in total, each with their own different missions, there should be plenty to do. And that's without even considering those hundred million monster permutations there are to build.

Monster Lab is coming out on Wii as well as DS, but on the handheld it's not looking like a scaled down version of the home console version. Instead, it's looking like a massively in-depth, filled with fun game. The fights in particular, which are watched on the DS top screen while you choose attacks on the touchscreen, are hugely comical to see.

It's not received quite the publicity Spore has, true, but Monster Lab could well be the unexpectedly underdog when it emerges later this year. It's got all the makings of something very different and very exciting, as anyone who likes punching off monster heads with a giant pointy claw they made themselves is bound to agree.