A solid tower defense title, but not quite the best available on PSN.
Savage Moon is another title that's taking on the tower defense style gameplay made popular on the PSN already by the successful Pixeljunk Monsters. However, the two titles are pretty much entirely different in theme, look, and overall gameplay, and while the core concept is indeed similar, Savage Moon is far enough removed from PJM to be worth a look..
The storyline, or setting of Savage Moon, is based upon different mining colonies that have been established on small moons in space. These locations harbor important resources, but are unfortunately guarded by vicious bug-like aliens, something that definitely feels like it's been ripped out of Starship Troopers.
To protect your operations on each of these moons, you need to put into play a variety of weapon placements, or towers, that will automatically fire at anything that moves within their radius, and this is where the actual gameplay comes in. When you begin the game, you're given a short tutorial giving you a couple of basic towers (machine guns and anti-air), and the ability to repair or upgrade them to different levels, depending on whether you have the funds to do so. Deploying the towers is done by highlighting a particular piece of the map, but you're mostly restricted to placing objects on top of small mountain ranges with flat surfaces that overlook the trenches the bugs use to navigate their way to your base on each moon.
Most of the action is pretty automatic, as soon as a bug enters into the firing radius for a tower that tower will turn and open fire on said bug, at which point you'll notice a little lifebar overhead that will give you an idea of how much damage needs to be done to take the threat out for good. Multiple towers will work in tandem, and for the most part the AI is good enough that the towers will stay on track until the job is finished, instead of constantly trying to switch to new targets or simply not fire at available enemies.
This is all pretty standard fare for a tower defense title at this point though, but Savage Moon does throw some new things into the mix. One is the command option, which allows you to change up three different factors between waves. You can switch between the ability to gain more money from kills, have stronger attacks, or a better defense. Using one of these skills will weaken the other two, or you can opt to choose two skills for a moderate bonus (but still weaken the third). You'll find yourself needing to play around with this a bit more in the later sections of the game rather then when it's actually introduced, but it does add a bit more strategy to the title past the actual tower placement.
Along with this, there are a few other tower designs that buck the usual shoot everything trend. One is simply a blocking segment, used to gum up a section of the trench and force the ground-based enemies to take a particular path. Another allows you to boost the power of nearby towers, while a third emits a repair pulse of sorts that will automatically regenerate the health of nearby towers.
Likewise, there are a few different enemy types to encounter, but most are variations on the flying/ground-based enemies you begin with. Some are quick, while others have an insane amount of health, and while most are visually different from each other, I did have trouble figuring out what was coming in each wave until they actually appeared. There is a meter at the top of the screen meant to tell you what to expect for each wave, but the tutorial never really covered what each symbol meant, and it did take me a few games of playing to start to understand the differences between each one.
Like other tower defense titles, you can opt to wait out a wave and use all that time for preparation, or you can tell the game to skip ahead and start the wave early. If you do start the wave early, there's usually some type of cash bonus involved if you successfully deflect the attack, which adds another bit of strategy to the title.
Visually, the game benefits greatly from an HD display, with some really nice texture work on the environment, and quite a bit of activity with no slowdown going on all at during the big battles. You can zoom in to tight spots on the action, or even opt to check out a ground-based camera for something more cinematic. Likewise, you can zoom out, but never quite enough to encompass the entire map. The flying enemies can surprise you at times, especially if you haven't bothered to scan around the entire board, since their placement is usually right at the edge of the screen, and not as instantly noticeable as the ground based holes the regular enemies crawl out of.
The audio isn't anything to get excited about, and I actually found the death cries of the bugs to be really annoying. It doesn't help that you're obliterating dozens of them at once, and they're all doing that weird scream at the same time, but it's definitely not something that will appeal to the ears.
All together though, I enjoyed Savage Moon quite a bit, and I look forward to checking out the Vengeance mode some more (unlocked after finishing a map, allowing for unlimited waves of enemies). It's a solid tower defense title, and provides enough differences from Pixeljunk Monsters to make it worth checking out. It's not quite my preferred tower defense game, but definitely something that I think fans will enjoy, and worth checking out if you haven't played a tower defense game yet.
