Battle Monsters

Similar to Atari's Pit-Fighter, the game makes heavy use of digitized human actors as the characters, plus some blood influenced by Midway's Mortal Kombat series.^{[citation needed]} The game features 12 playable fighters, and plays out on multi-tiered stages.^[1]

Battle Monsters was panned by most critics, who found that the scaling graphics, complex controls, interactive backgrounds, and multi-tiered arenas do not work together well.^[3][4] They also razed the choppy animation and pixelization on the digitized sprites, and likened the game to a second-rate Way of the Warrior clone.^[3][4][5] Crispin Boyer of Electronic Gaming Monthly called it "one sorry mess of a fighting game",^[3] GamePro said it "doesn't even deserve coverage",^[6] and Jeff Gerstmann summarized in GameSpot, "While Battle Monsters does have some good ideas and twists on the standard fighting game, the whole package is poorly executed".^[4] However, GameFan defended Battle Monsters, assessing that "The gameplay, though not conventional, can be entertaining, with 12 moves plus a super for each ghoul. And while the digitized graphics don't impress me as much as they did a year ago [when the game was released in Japan], they are still representative of the monsters they surround."^[7] Reviewing the Japanese version as an import, Next Generation stated that "the characters are never quite enveloped within the background. Instead, what's left is a nice background with characters which seem to be cut and pasted on to the television screen."^[5]

• Killing Zone, sequel
• List of fighting games