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Every year there’s a game that comes out flying under the radar that seems to get pushed into the background by the latest 3D gaming or motion control related injury news. Yet it manages to knock the socks of anyone who plays it. For me this year that game is Monday Night Combat. It’s addictive, it’s fast, it’s initially simplistic but develops into complex strategy, it looks gorgeous, it sounds great, Monday Night Combat rings every bell I have.

Best of all the game is an Xbox Live Arcade title, following Deathspank and Limbo in Xbox Live’s games of winter round up. You can queue it up and download it right now for 1200 MS points (and on a side note Microsoft seriously need to change the purchasing system for points so you can just buy 1200 if they’re going to price all their new releases arcade games at that point, forcing people to buy 300 arbitrary points is unethical).

Filling your juice bar lets you temporarily over charge and perform massive damage

It combines the class based shooter gameplay of titles like Team Fortress 2, albeit third person instead of first, with the objective based, push pull gameplay of tower defence games like Defence of the Ancients. There are two game types, Blitz that sees your team defend your money ball against hordes of AI robots and Crossfire which is 6 versus 6 pvp where the teams money ball has to be assaulted while your own is defended by both enemy players and a steady onslaught of weaker AI enemies.

Don't laugh at the bearded guy in the egg suit, that's a jet fuel flame thrower he's carrying

You play as the Pros, six cloned killing machines with individual skills, abilities and weapons that give them a specific role in combat. While the Sniper and the Assassin are ideal at taking out other Pros, they’re not so handy against the hordes of AI controlled robots that constantly attack your teams money ball. Likewise the hulking Tank and Gunner can take out robots easily and are essential for attacking team bases and taking out turrets, but are easy prey to the Sniper and Assassin. The Assault is your jack of all trades, ace of none, character and the Support is your medic, best kept behind the lines to heal and build and upgrade turret’s around your money ball. Money earned in game can be spent on upgrading your three skills (things like flight, invisibility, grenades) or your base abilities. If you’re unhappy with the classes and their various abilities you can change their perks around using the custom class feature, unlocked when you reach a certain amount of cash.

If you're sneaky, and smart, the Assassin is the ideal character for taking out other Pros, particularly troublesome Support's

The character’s themselves are superbly designed with a basic black and primary colour base design (orange or blue depending on your team) and cartoon like features similar to Team Fortress 2 (and colourful taunts as well, in fact just consider the characters the future versions of Team Fortress 2). Each class has it’s own voice and catch phrases and a bio. They’re the type of colourful and iconically designed game characters that you immediately want to buy action figures off. In addition to the Pros there’s the robots, some of whom present a far greater threat than mere cannon fodder and points padding, Bullseye the MNC official mascot who gyrates and dances during bonus rounds and attacking him earns you money and the unofficial mascot, the hot pants wearing, hip shaking mechanic Pitgirl who’s far hotter than a mechatronic engineer has any right to be.

The Jackbot, a walking, battleship stuffed with cash

The entire pseudo professional sports vibe to Monday Night Combat adds flavour to a winning formula. The over zealous announcers comments are mostly hilarious, the perks you can assign to your custom class are sponsored by various bizarre companies and products and having a chanting, screaming crowd in the background as you reduce armies of robots to scrap feels oddly appropriate.

To keep you coming back persistent career tracking covers everything from how long you’ve been invisible as the Assassin, to how many turrets you’ve built around your base and awards you Pro tags for milestones. Plus there are protags available for pulling off other noteworthy feets like surviving a game without getting killed. The game is constantly getting automatically tweaked to compensate for any perceived exploits in any of the character classes using a server based update system that supercedes the Xbox Live approval required for a conventional patch. I've all ready noticed certain classes playing differently from night to night and subtle adjustments here and there to prevent there being any guaranteed winning formula of classes.

The Blitz Arena where you have to defend your money ball against robots spawning from six locations

The title isn’t entirely without issues. There are only four maps for Crossfire and one map for the cooperative Blitz mode. Really this isn’t a big issue, the gameplay is the real focus and five maps seems like plenty, even after sinking hours into the game. But there will be grumbles as to the value for money you are getting out of five maps (even though you’re paying a quarter of the cost for a game five times more fun than most retail games). So, that. Plus two game types will likely rub the value for money people the wrong way as well. But think of MNC like a sports game rather than a shooter and you see the fit, especially the push pull style of the games due to the tower defence type format.

The Sniper is a butt hole you'll be all too happy to plug, I mean kill

Of greater concern are balance issues with Blitz. It seems like the cooperative mode didn’t get as much testing and love as Crossfire. The game is a lot easier played in single player than it does with three friends over Live. This is due to the stacking of enemy numbers to compensate for extra players and the ultimate result is your team getting swamped by AI enemies and having the money ball cracked in no time at all, whereas handling the mode on your own you’d have done much better. Obviously this is backwards, completely counter to the point of a cooperative gameplay mode. Hopefully this is something Uber Entertainment can tweak in the coming weeks to make Blitz more friend friendly. Monday Night Combat's biggest issue is the same issue all online dedicated games have, lag for intercontinental games and peaking and falling user base. So far the former is noticeable as it is in all online shooters. If your playing against US gamers you might want to use the Support class. The latter problem hasn't been a big issue so far, there's plenty of aussies playing the game right now (and there will be for at least the next two weeks until Halo: Reach comes out), the game is easy to warm to and easy to enjoy and there's a good chance it will suck in even more players over time.

Monday Night Combat has that x factor that online games strive for, that just one more factor that has you joining the queue for a match long after you should have gone to bed. And it’s not the career tracking, or the cool character models, or class abilities, although all those things contribute. It's that the gameplay is non stop dynamite fun. If you can't remember the last time you just really enjoyed playing an online shooter without hurling your controller in frustration try Monday Night Combat. Even when you're losing you have great time playing it.