- Too many monsters iconic to the Dungeons & Dragons experience are missing. You can feel the marketing ploy of spreading the critters through multiple volumes to squeeze dollars out of the fans.

- Monsters exist for one purpose, and one purpose only: fight the PCs for a few rounds. That's it. Period. Ecologies are useless, any considerations beyond tactical roles in the game are useless.

- Critters are off-the-wall stupid rather inspired on actual mythology. The actual cultural inspiration of D&D is absent from this book beyond what was done by previous editions. What's actually "new" here is just bad pop variations of known quantities rather than genuinely new and cool stuff. You can see that the designers just don't give a crap about the classical roots of the game.

For these reasons, and more, I have to fail this book. 1 star. Abysmal failure of a game. Try again.

Ok. The monsters that are here are great. BUT there are just too many iconic monsters missing. Missing dragons. Missing giants. Missing mundane animals, for goodness sake. And this book has the same physical quality problems in the other 4E core books: Bendy spine, crappy binding, smudgy ink. Falls frustratingly short of its great potential.

Though this book has some wonderful artwork and is decently laid out it falls far short of a product I would spend money on. Its too bad that if you wish to run 4e you need this book..

WoTC again left out much of the ecology of the creatures contained and added many monsters that are more at home in Magic the Gathering then Dungeons and Dragons...

The aim of this Monster Manual, as with previous editions, is to provide an array of interesting opponents for your characters. It is evident from the very start that a lot of thought has been put into the layout of the entries and the way in which information is presented. This makes it very easy both to select suitable monsters as you design encounters and to run actual combat with the details you need presented handily.

Mechanically, as a catalogue of combat opposition, it's excellent. However, if you like to present an alternate reality in which the monsters live, you are going to have to draw on other resources such as 'monster ecology' books and articles from earlier editions, just using 4e statistics rather than those in your other books when a fight breaks out.

Read the full review at http://www.rpg-resource.org.uk/index.php?article=3598&visual=4

Brilliant art, sound design for monsters, the Monster Manual may be packed with monsters to kill, but people don't realize killable monsters can fight alongside the party as well.

Monsters such as unicorns, angels (of the player's gods), and any of the basic race's monster statistics can help the player, while many more are enemies. However, looking back at the other Monster Manuals, most of the creatures were enemies as well.

The Monster Manual 4e makes monster design far easier, and it makes monsters far more fun to run and fight against! This edition gets it RIGHT when it comes to monsters.

The Monster Manual is awful. A third of the pictures are just rehashed from all the previous Monster Manuals. The book is concerned with stats so you can play your miniature game effectively. Again.... great if your into miniature gaming. The ecology and culture information is virtually non-existant. Make all the arguments you want about this now being in the pervue of the DM.. the honest answer is that WOC is being lazy. You have a vast variety of stats to place against your carefully created stats, but very little flavor to guide you in roleplaying the encounters.

If you LOVE miniature wargaming. If Warhammer is something you daydream about.... this is the game for you! As a miniature game experience it ranks a three or four...

If you love games that take place in your head fired by limitless imagination then your probably going to be disappointed.

I really feel like power gamers are going to LOVE this game and probably flame me for my remarks. The game is geared towards being 'godlike'. I'm not knocking this. If you love powergaming and twinking then this is DEFFINITLEY the game for you. To each his or her own. You should buy it immediately... and keep DnD fiscally sound enough to perhaps manage an inevitable rewrite that might restore my faith.

Ironically I'll be keeping my set... I think it'll make a great board game for those rare nights when I just wanna run through dungeons killings things and working off frustrations. According to the DMG I don't even need a DM to do this..... Sound like any RPG you ever heard of???? No story teller... no RPG. Just another board wargame.. albeit a pretty good one.

Good day!

I have been playing DND since good ole first edition and every one since up to and including 3.5...so there was some excitement about the new system. In terms of pure roleplaying this new edition was going to either rock or blow chunks as it was quite different. I am reviewing the system in the terms of the roleplaying aspect(What DND is supposed to be) and not as any other game type. The end result....yup you guessed it...a huge step backwards.

Gone is the incredible detail of characters that is the trademark of DND and in place is now AT WILL POWERS...or more simply...DND for Dummies. The true flavor of being a character is gone and now there are powers that remind you of playing a video game or an even better comparison...a Miniatures game! The Monster Manual shows the creature(The artwork is the one huge plus in this edition, but I dont buy games just for art) and the stats...which have symbols....very much like the minis game. The feel is hack and slash and the idea that you add half your level to attack...crazy no matter the class. I do like that there are 30 levels now, but to break them up into 3 tiers...no need.

All in all our gaming group is staying with 3.5 and we will be fine with that...sad really....this is the first DND system we will not switch to. Different can be good, not just this edition. Too bad WOC listened to the online gamers instead of the true source of money (The Pure PRGers).

As a side note, If I were going to rate this system as part of a minis game (war-gaming)with the touch of roleplaying thrown on top of it....I think it is quite good. Similar to Battletech minis and adding the Mechwarrior RPG on top of it. It is simple and has clear and limited choices for advancement...all good for minis games....not RPGs.

Any hope of a real RPG...say 4.5?

Well I just got mine yesterday and spent the evening flipping through it. Love the art. Love that some of my favorite creatures from the latter monster manuals made it in. Love that creature backstories have been tied into the assumed setting rather than the usual handwaving of "may have been created by failed magical experimentation". Everything at least has a place in the setting.

That said...where's my book? The promise I read was that this book was going to be written with an eye toward ecology and background, with every creature getting between 1-3 pages of text about what it is and how it fits into the world. Maybe those pages must have fallen out or something. Instead got a book with 2-3 statblocks, some really lame tactics blurbs, and two or three sentences on WHAT they are. The knowledge roll based backgrounds gave somewhat more, but not much. Pretty frustrating.

That and, remember all that stuff about a sweet spot that runs through the game? Great. So why is it that until you get to level 10 you still can't fight anything? It's back to goblins, orcs and dire rats. It seems like the first ten levels are going to be pretty desolate after all. I was really hoping for a smattering of evocative cool low level badguys--guys for "heroic" characters to throw themselves up against. Certainly the new system lends itself toward a more level playing field, right? You get none of that here.

Anyway, the art is great, and as a primer on what monsters are going to be in 4e, what they look like, and a hint as to their place in the new setting, the book works fine. For those looking to really sink their teeth into the new game though, the book really kind of stinks.