Review of Garden Gnome Carnage

I played this a game a few years ago when it first came out on Yoyogames. It placed second in a winter competition held on the site. I was pleasantly surprised to see this game available as an Xbox indie game.

In Garden Gnome Carnage you play as a building with a garden gnome tied to your chimney. Soldiers are trying to climb the building in order to liberate the gnome from the building. You don't want that to happen. There are many ways of dealing with these intruders such as swinging your gnome at them, shaking them off your building, throwing explosive bricks at them, and calling in some airstrikes. These guys are relentless though and will come at you in the hundreds with all that they've got. There's also a friendly cat that tries to climb your building to refill your bricks. That cat is the one thing that you do want to reach the chimney. If you chain enough combos together you can also play a quick minigame that will benefit you if you manage to win. The game ends when someone finally reaches your chimney.

Garden Gnome Carnage is one of those crazy ideas that definitely deserve a try. The game is just fun to play. It keeps track of your scores so you can keep track of your progress. It says it has online leaderboards as well but I don't think they are working at the moment. It also has a level up button that allows you to skip the early slow levels and get into the action faster at level 20.

The only downside to buying the game is that you can already play the game for free on several different flash sites with the only difference really being that the flash version is more Christmas oriented with elves/gnomes trying to capture you instead of soldiers. The game is great either way and should be played. It sales for 80 microsoft points.

It is still a great original game a few years later. Garden Gnome Carnage gets a 4/4.