How to Install Monday Night Combat and Join a Server

Monday Night Combat is not presented as a war. It is presented as a televised sports show — crowd, commentator, advertising breaks that happen while you are being shot at.

The commentary is the thing people remember. It does not narrate the match so much as sell you things during it, in the voice of a man who has been doing late-night regional television for twenty years and has stopped caring. Somebody dies and he is halfway through a promotion for a snack product.

Underneath the joke is a genuinely unusual shooter, and it arrived several years before the wave of games that borrowed its ideas. Listings collect on the game's hub.

What it actually is

Take a class-based shooter. Add a lane. Add waves of robots walking down it, and turrets you buy and upgrade with money you earn during the match. Put an objective at the end that you cannot shoot until your robots get there.

That is Monday Night Combat: a shooter and a tower defence game running at the same time, in the same space, with the same money.

There are two modes and they are barely related to each other.

Crossfire is the competitive one. Two teams of six. Two bases, robot waves pushing down the middle, a Moneyball at each end. You cannot simply shoot the enemy Moneyball — it is shielded, and getting that shield down is what your robots are for. So the match becomes a constant argument between four things you cannot all do at once: attacking the enemy players; escorting your own bots; killing theirs; spending money on turrets rather than on yourself.

Blitz is the cooperative one. Escalating waves of robots and a base to defend with turrets and teamwork. It is a tower defence game in which you are one of the towers.

The six classes

They are not variations on a theme. Each one does a different job and is bad at the others.

Assault is the all-rounder with mobility. It gets around the map faster than anything else and is the class most able to change where the fight is happening.

Tank is the heavy. Short range, and it absorbs a great deal of damage. It has a charge that scatters everybody standing in front of it, and it is the class that breaks a defensive line by walking into it.

Support is the reason a team functions. It heals players. It repairs and upgrades turrets, and it takes enemy turrets over. A Support player who spends the match keeping the team's defences alive contributes more than the scoreboard will ever show them credit for.

Assassin cloaks and moves fast, and kills people from behind. It is also the class best suited to quietly deleting the enemy's robot wave while everybody is looking somewhere else, which is frequently more useful than the kills.

Gunner trades movement for firepower. Set up in the right place and it holds a lane on its own; caught in the open and it is a large slow target.

Sniper does what snipers do, with traps to cover the ground it cannot watch.

The class balance conversation in this game was never really finished, and the Assassin is at the centre of most of it. Being killed instantly from behind by something you never saw is not a fun way to die, and every server's regulars have opinions about it.

Money is the mechanic

Everything you do generates money. Killing robots, killing players, holding ground.

You then choose between two ways to spend it, and this choice is the game.

Spend on yourself and you upgrade your class mid-match, becoming individually stronger. Spend on the map and you buy or upgrade turrets, which defend even when you are somewhere else.

A team where everybody upgrades themselves loses to organised pushes because there is nothing holding the base while they are out. A team that spends everything on turrets gets picked apart by players who have out-levelled them. The right answer changes as the match progresses, and reading it correctly is what separates good Crossfire teams from bad ones.

Sitting on top of that is Juice, a meter that fills as you do damage and briefly makes you enormously more dangerous when you spend it. Juiced players end pushes. Watching the enemy team's Juice is a real skill and almost nobody does it.

The honest position

Monday Night Combat is not a game you can casually find a full match of.

Its free-to-play successor was shut down years ago. The original has an install base of people who own it and a much smaller one of people who still play it, and there is no queue you can press a button on that will assemble eleven other people.

That is the whole obstacle, and it is worth stating plainly rather than burying at the bottom of a guide. Nothing about your setup is broken if you launch this game and find nobody in it.

There are still two real ways to play.

Blitz survives a small population. The opposition is robots, so a couple of friends and a free evening is enough. This is the honest recommendation for most people buying the game now.

Crossfire needs organisation. Twelve people, agreed in advance, at a time everybody has committed to. That is a Discord arrangement rather than a matchmaking one.

Getting a game together

The pattern for every game in this position is the same, and it is worth learning because it applies to a long list of titles.

The remaining players are not distributed across the day waiting to be found. They are concentrated into scheduled sessions organised somewhere outside the game, and that somewhere is almost always Discord. One person keeps a channel, somebody posts a time, and a game that appears completely dead produces a full lobby on a Saturday evening.

We wrote about how Discord changed the way gaming communities organise themselves, and games like this are the clearest possible illustration. The in-game state of things at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday tells you nothing about whether the game is playable.

If you already have six friends, you do not need any of that. Buy it together and agree an evening, then play Blitz until everybody understands the classes. Crossfire makes far more sense once people know what a Support is for.

Playing it with two or three people

Blitz does not need a full team, and this is the thing that makes the game worth owning in its current state.

A pair who understand what their classes do will get further into a run than six people who do not, and the mode scales down more gracefully than most cooperative games of its era. That makes it something to own alongside one friend and play occasionally, rather than a game demanding that you assemble eleven other people every time you want to see it.

Pick complementary classes rather than the two that look most entertaining. A Support and almost anything works. Two Assassins does not, and you will discover why during the first wave that includes something large.

Installing it

It is a Steam purchase and installs the ordinary way, from your Library. There is no separate launcher.

The install is small and the hardware requirements are from a different era, so it will run on anything. If Steam is new to you, our installation guide covers the account side properly.

Before buying, read the recent reviews rather than the overall score. For an old multiplayer game, the last dozen reviews are the only ones describing what happens when somebody installs it today, and they will tell you more about the current state of the game than anything else on the page.

Launch it once and go through the settings, then play some Blitz before you touch anything competitive. The classes take a match each to understand and the money system takes longer.

Problems you will run into

The lobby never fills. Population, not configuration. Nothing on your machine will change it, and waiting longer will not either.

The game opens at the wrong resolution. Titles of this vintage guess badly on modern displays. Set it in the video options, and restart the game if the change does not take on the first try.

You keep dying to something you never saw. An Assassin. Check behind you more, and stand near somebody else.

Your turrets keep vanishing. Either the enemy Support has taken them over or somebody is quietly destroying them while your team looks the other way. Turrets are not permanent, and rebuilding them is part of the job rather than a sign you did something wrong.

Nothing you do damages the Moneyball. It is shielded. Push your robots.

What it left behind

The reason to care about Monday Night Combat is not nostalgia. It is that a great many things you have played since were in here first.

A class shooter with a lane; minions; an objective you unlock by pushing minions into it; in-match progression bought with currency you earn during the match. That description covers a substantial slice of what the industry spent the following decade making. This game did it as a comedy about a sports channel, and then its studio moved on to other things.

That is worth an evening on its own terms, even played against robots.

Where to go next

Team Fortress 2 is the obvious relative — the same idea that classes should be genuinely different rather than differently-skinned, with an enormous community server population that never went away. If the class design is what appeals here, that is where to spend the time.

Natural Selection 2 is the closest thing to Monday Night Combat's other half: a shooter with structures and resources, and somebody making building decisions while everybody else fights. It asks more of a team than almost anything else on this site.

For the cooperative wave-defence half, Killing Floor and Killing Floor 2 do it without the tower defence layer but with a much healthier chance of finding people to play with. Our guide to finding servers worth joining covers the general problem.

Monday Night Combat is a good game that ran out of players. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the second one is the part to plan around.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Monday Night Combat servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.