Pixeljunk Monsters is all that and bit more, using incredibly bright and colorful 2D HD artwork to breath life into a form of RTS that has seen virtually no play on home consoles before. Combined with some really fantastic music, you'll easily find yourself wasting hours on top of hours defending your small band of Voodoo/Jungle kids from a small variety of rampaging monsters.

The core gameplay of Pixeljunk Monsters revolves around placing defenses along a route that leads to your home, wherein your villagers reside. You do so by controlling one villager, leading him about and selecting the surrounding trees to be rebuilt into a variety of towers that use different attacks to fend off wave after wave of invading monsters.

The monsters themselves all have particular characteristics, and you need to build your defense towers to match their abilities to provide the best defense. For instance, one wave can consist of small spider like creatures, which are the quickest of the bunch. Cannon towers might hurt them, but they're not entirely effective because the little guys move so quickly. Instead, you're better of with the crossbow towers that have a much more rapid rate of fire, or better yet, you can build a tower that will cause them to slow down as they go by, and then your cannon tower can become much more effective. Keep in mind that's just for one wave, and in each level (laid out in map form), you'll encounter multiple waves of various monsters.

When you first make it past the tutorial level (which does a great job of covering the basics), you'll have access to three different towers. However, as you kill off monsters, you'll gain gems that you can use to research and unlock new towers, or you can use the gems to power up your existing towers already in play. As you defeat more monsters, your towers will also gain experience and become stronger, and when the action dies down, you can dance around the towers to build up their experience as well.

Monsters will also drop money, which you use to build your towers in the first place. If you're a bit short on cash but are in desperate need of a new tower for an upcoming wave, you can opt to tear down a tower or two and gain cash from that to build your new defense. Obviously, as the game progresses, you'll need to really think out not only the amount of a particular tower you'll need, but where to place it and how long to keep it in play.

While the game is deceptively simple on the surface, there's much more to mastering each level as you progress further in. If you manage to finish a particular stage with all the villagers intact, you'll gain a rainbow, which will eventually allow you to unlock more sections of the map and enter new areas. There are a variety of stage types to see as well, and the stage layouts never feel too similar.

Everything is easy to control, and there's not a lot of confusing menu junk to sort thru. You'll have no problem jumping in, and I definitely believe you'll be hooked from the starting point on out. A great way to spend $10 or so, especially for something that will keep you entertained for quite a while.