Activision and Beenox Studios team up to bring you the video game from the DreamWorks hit movie Monsters vs Aliens. Although you don’t have to see the movie to appreciate the game it certainly may help with the story line in the game.

The game plays out several of the movies scenes in the battle against Gallaxhar, an invading evil alien that has numerous robots on his side to accomplish his goal which is to conquer earth, of course. Now it’s up to you to play as a group of super-powered monsters to fight off these aliens and defend earth from this evil villain. Simple but classic.

Players will play as four of the movie’s characters, the recently captured Ginormica aka Susan who plays a pivotal role in the movie, the half fish-half ape creature unthawed from a block of ice named The Missing Link and B.O.B. a gelatinous mass, while Dr. Cockroach whose insect like appearance is an unfortunate side effect of a experiment gone wrong.

Dr. Cockroach is technically a playable character but he is only available to play in co-op mode. However in co-op two people can play simultaneously, only one can play onscreen. The second person can play as an off-screen Dr. Cockroach, who only appears as a reticule onscreen. The second player can use it to assist in combat by shooting lasers at enemies, or picking them up with a tractor beam to get them out of the way. I thought it was a good way to play with your kids but a little boring.

Monsters vs Aliens spans four chapters and about 25 missions – the entire thing taking about 8 hours to finish the story mode depending on your skill level, and about 700 achievement points for you 360 users. You will collect thousands of molecules of DNA during the levels that you can spend to purchase nodes in a giant DNA strand. Each node represents artwork, level commentary, monster upgrades, movie stills, or mini-games. These mini-games are good fun if you want to get away from the main game for awhile.

Graphically, the game is about par for a kid’s movie title game. The characters look very similar to their characters in the movie which is nice. The environments look ok but the level of detail is pretty low.

As for the audio, the sound effects and background music are done well enough to hold your attention. The voice-work is top-notch thanks to Reese Witherspoon (Ginormica), Seth Rogen (B.O.B), Will Arnett (The Missing Link) and Rainn Wilson (Gallahxhar), which are the voices from the movie.

As far as replay value, there are 35 mini-game challenges that you can unlock, online leaderboards and a good list of unlockables that varies from movie stills to level commentary. So it won’t keep you busy for long.

Overall it’s a good kid’s game and I have to remind myself of that sometimes. Graphics are like most kids games, nothing flashy. The game play has some fun moments but becomes highly repetitive. The voice over from the cast makes the audio somewhat nice.  Replay value is pretty low. I think achievement junkies looking for easy points will be fine, for the full 1000 achievement points you are easily looking at 10-12 hours of game time depending on your skill. The game is worth a rental for most people, or it might be a good buy if your kids really loved the movie. The game is available on just about every platform so give it a try like I did. I give it a 6.5 and a thumbs up.