Anyway, let’s dive into the scenario - 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!

We’ve put a lot of effort into the design and balance of the various stages and each one requires you to try out different strategies and combinations of towers, and this is where the game is thoroughly addicting. Some might initially think the game is hard, but that’s just because we have tuned it to give you that Tower Defense-like “just.. one.. more.. go” experience. Before you know it, it is 5 a.m. in the morning!

Out of all the games I have made over the years, PixelJunk Monsters was probably the hardest to balance and tune! In the end, it took a whole team of planners (Japanese for game designer) to play the game non-stop for a month and record their data into a database from which we adjusted money/gems/toughness of enemies etc., accordingly. They were all thoroughly addicted by the end of this process and even after completing the game in its entirety numerous times they still boot it up for “one more go.” The online rankings are going to be pretty competitive for this title and there are separate tables for cooperative and single play. The cooperative mode actually gets people to talk to each other as they play, and seeing as girls love this game (no, honestly, they do!), Monsters could become an important tool in every lad’s arsenal!

Buying less towers equals more MONEY, getting higher wave bonuses equals more MONEY, selling towers off equals more MONEY.

MORE MONEY

ok Smile, this stage was very easy to be honest. I did it again with no problems. Sorry about the assy pics.







So build cannons at trees 1, 2, and 3. Build Arrows at trees 4, 5, and 6 and at any of the checkmarked trees in case the spiders get through (don't go overboard). From here on you should do fine. I had tons of gems and enough gold. For the first wave of little flying monsters, build three AA guns a few more arrow towers. For the golems, build the cannons at the top left of the map as shown. I built the fire towers fairly late, in the wave before the blue-shielded guys (I built the top one first). I upgraded it to level two and just danced on it. The second fire tower goes up shortly after. I didn't even use gems on the fire towers, I kept dancing since there wasn't much else to do (I upgraded both to black with gems). You should have plenty of gems, around 20. I researched the laser tower and built only one laser tower. The spot in the pic isn't the best, you'll probably want to replace one of the arrow towers on the left side instead (I had enough for more but didn't bother). The only wave that gave me trouble is the last spider wave. You'll want plenty of arrow towers, including the ones on the right side. One spider actually got through to the base and my last two arrow towers killed it. Other than that, the two fire towers pretty much destroyed everything.

For the boss, I upgraded some of the cannon towers to black because I had gems but you really don't need to. I'm not sure if they count toward the final score, but I should have held onto them. Just replace all the AA and arrow towers with cannons and sell off the laser tower.

How do you find time to play all these games man? You play FFXI, this, and like 20 other games.