Game Stooge

PixelJunk Monsters Due January 24

• Scribbled on January 17th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Casual Gaming, Game Videos, PlayStation Network, Release Date(s), Sony PlayStation 3, Strategy

PlayStation Blog is reporting that PixelJunk Monsters will hit the PlayStation Network Store next week, January 24, the next game after Racer by PixelJunk.They also explain the rules of the game - click “Read more…” to read them.

You have to protect your island and its villagers from the monster horde and you begin roughly in the center of the island where there are about 20 villages to defend in 3 areas; designated easy, medium and hard. In each area there is a special end stage that gives you some kind of ability or power-up when you complete it.

If you save all the little villagers in a particular stage a rainbow will be displayed and collecting these rainbows allows you to unlock new areas to explore.

For the easy set of levels there are ten waves of monsters. There are quite a few types, but to begin with I feel it’s a good idea to warn you about the spiders - they are FAST!

When monsters are killed, they drop coins for you to run around and collect and this money lets you build more towers. Occasionally they will drop little gems that are pretty important.

The gems have two purposes: the first is that you can use them to upgrade existing towers, up to four times each. The second purpose for gems is to allow you to research new types of tower to build:

Ice Tower: Slows down monsters within a small splash area – handy against spiders. This can slow down whole groups when it is upgraded.

Fire Tower: Basically, a tower that fires napalm – once it fires it keeps firing for a while but doesn’t track the monsters so is good for taking out long lines of enemies. It takes a while to reload though, which can let monsters slip through

Tesla Tower: This tower charges up and fires out simultaneously at all the monsters nearby with electric plasma, it can be tricky to place but at the same time it can be really effective when used by skillful players.

Laser Tower: This fires out a straight and very long single laser shot and is only effective against flying monsters; if you can place this tower where it can catch the monsters in a line it is very powerful as the laser will go through all of them

Hive Tower: You can only build one of these but it creates little flying creatures that will congregate around you and attack any monsters nearby. This is a very esoteric tower.

Mortar Tower: Basically a very powerful cannon, this has huge range and an equally big explosion – upgrading one of these babies all the way will make you pretty formidable.

Working out which towers are most efficient against which enemies is the key to this game - but it’s not as simple as it sounds!

(Thanks, PlayStation Blog.)