Montaro – Such Runner, Very Jump, Wow

From the past reviews and articles, some may believe I am a very serious gamer with no time for being a casual pleb.  It is to my honour that I bring to attention today the game Montaro by developer JCKSLAP. It is a casual game of the endless runner genre that can be found on Steam for a whopping dollar! I mean, come on, skip a Timmies and get this, trust me on this one buddy.

“Montaro is a DOGE” is the simplest way for putting it, directly from JCKSLAP themselves (the dev).  You play as Montaro, an adorable little shiba strutting through town, exploring the world and dodging obstacles that would refrain you from seeing everything your fluffy little paws will bring you to.  Through your perilous adventure to an upbeat soundtrack, you must evade crows, chickens and banana peels among other things while making sure to protect yourself with panties that you steal various school girls you meet during your travels.

Graphically speaking, the game is not a cinematic experience in realism.  Keeping it simple, the game is very cartoon like and quite adorable.  From the start, you can play as Shiba or an alternate Shade wearing, cigarette smoking Shiba.  More costumes are unlockable through the game such as a banana outfit wearing Shiba or a white Shiba (those are the two I unlocked so far).  All of these costumes can be unlocked by collecting coins on the higher part of the level, you know, the tricky part filled with obstacles. Most obstacle are direct, you hit them, it’s game over.  There is some obstacles that trigger other events instead of instant death.  The banana peels will make you bounce proportionally from how high you fall from before hitting them.  The chicken is very reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda’s cuccos.  After hitting a chicken, it will leave the screen while clucking only to come with its squad to trample you down.  The other main threat is the flock of small birds resting on ledges.  They will fly away and home onto your position on the screen before coming in towards you in a straight line.

The game’s audio is very limited but this does not bring the charm down in any way.  Keeping it simple, you’ll have the sounds for the various animals you encounter, the dreaded sound you hear when hitting an obstacle and the cute little jumping sound effect.  The downside to this is the BGM is only 3 track big, however, each track fit the simple beauty of the game. Also to note, there is no voice over but none is needed and for international players, the menus do come in English, French, Japanese, German, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Controls are quite straight forward and hard to mess up.  Left click makes you jump, tap it for a small jump, hold it for a higher/longer one.  With controls as such, when you fail, it due mostly to your own fault. I say mostly because the obstacles are randomized and I’ve seen a few times where there was no way of dodging all of them.

Ultimately, this game does not redefine the genre but is a cute addition to games I mindlessly play while waiting for things to download, patch or even while trying to figure out what to actually do.  The price tag is more than okay for some simple fun.

Oh, for those wondering if your PC can run it, well, if your system runs Windows 7, you can play this game, just saying, but here’s a breakdown of the specs as indicated on Steam.

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7/8/8.1/10 32/64bit
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo or greater
Memory: 256 MB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 or greater
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 160 MB available space

If you wish to see gameplay footage, you can see it on my YouTube Channel by following this link: