Similar to Atari's Pit-Fighter, the game makes heavy use of digitized human actors as the characters, plus some blood influenced by Midway's Mortal Kombat series.

[1] Battle Monsters was panned by most critics, who found that the scaling graphics, complex controls, interactive backgrounds, and multi-tiered arenas do not work together well.

[2][3] They also razed the choppy animation and pixelization on the digitized sprites, and likened the game to a second-rate Way of the Warrior clone.

[3] However, GameFan defended Battle Monsters, assessing that "The gameplay, though not conventional, can be entertaining, with 12 moves plus a super for each ghoul.

And while the digitized graphics don't impress me as much as they did a year ago [when the game was released in Japan], they are still representative of the monsters they surround.