By Ned Jordan
If you've played another game available on the PlayStationNetwork titled
Pixel Junk Monsters then you'll know about 90% of all there is to know about
Savage Moon. Replace the cute monster invaders with bug-like aliens and
the village filled with cute critters with a lunar mining operation and you've
basically got Savage Moon. So if you're a Pixel Junk Monsters player who
can't get enough of the tower defense strategy gameplay, you'll probably love
Savage Moon. If Pixel Junk Monsters scratched that particular itch well
enough for you, then there's not much point in reliving the experience with
Savage Moon. And now for the rest of you, let's look at just what all this
tower defense business is about anyway...
The levels in Savage Moon consist of a series of maze-like canyons that all
lead to a mining operation. As is often the case when collecting resources
from a far off place, the natives aren't usually too happy with the whole thing.
In this case, the locals are nasty insectoids that would be at home in a
Starship Troopers movie. They make their attacks in waves, emerging from
caves and holes at the opposite end of the canyons from your mining base with
the one intent and purpose of destroying it. Your job is to prevent them
from every reaching the mining operation by forcing them to run a gauntlet of
defensive towers armed with machine guns, lasers, mortars, and the like.
Here's where the strategic part of the strategy gameplay comes in; you'll have a
limited budget at your disposal with which to purchase towers and tower
upgrades, so you'll need to be smart about which towers you buy and where you
place them. Different towers work better against some aliens more than
others as they come in a variety of forms from lumbering to scuttling to flying.
Killing bugs earns you money to buy more tellers, so the better you are at your
job, the even better you can be at your job. Each level consists of
thirteen
waves of attacks, and in a nice touch the game will let you know what type of
aliens will be coming in each wave. This will help you to determine which
types of towers you'll have to have on hand to fight the next wave, and in
another nice touch you can initiate the next wave early if your ready for it.
The game also does a great job of making it easy to access all of the various
menus used to select towers and research tower upgrades, and it's easy to
quickly pick and place each tower. The thing that you have no control over
is which bugs your towers target. For the most part they handle the job
well enough, but there are times when your towers will give up on a bug near
death to target a new one and let the injured bug through to attack your mine.
There's a certain addicting quality to the gameplay, and the strategic almost
puzzle-like aspect of proper tower placement. There's satisfaction to be
drawn from watching a few well-placed towers decimate a wave of aliens and your
adrenaline will surge when a group of aliens finds a hole in your defenses and
you frantically work to plug the gap. If this kind of thing sounds
appealing to you, you'll have a lot of fun with the game ... with the first few
levels at least. After playing for a while, though, one maze begins to
feel like another. There's not an extensive variety of towers or aliens in
the game, so there's a lot of more of the same as you progress through the game.
The gameplay is fun, but variety is not its strong suit. Once you make it
through all of the game's waves, they're there for you to replay or you can try
your luck with the Vengeance mode which is basically an endless attack mode.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
75%. Savage Moon is the creepy-crawly version of
Pixel Junk Monsters.
