Publisher: Double Eleven
Release Date: August 26 2013 (PC)
Price: $9.99
Where to Buy: Steam
The PixelJunk series is well knwon among playstation Network users, now the developers are porting them all to Steam. If you missed the chance to play these great titles on the PSN now is your chance to enjoy and have lots of fun with the Pixel Junk series.
This time around we will review PixelJunk Ultimate Monsters HD, if you know me you know i’m passionate for tower defense! I am glad i get to review it, special thanks to Double Eleven for the review code!
Story
You play as a Tikiman the guardian of the forest and basically, protect the younglings of your village from the monsters by building towers, simple as that and fun like you can’t imagine.
Gameplay
You have to protect your village by building towers, like in any other tower defense game you can upgrade towers. The game mechanics are easy to learn which is good as it contributes to a simple and relaxing gameplay. Well, let’s be honest.. it can be relaxing at first but difficulty increases, some stages can have really hectic waves, you need to be quick and have a good strategy to beat the stage.
The challenge is quite good and beating a stage or a challenge feels truly rewarding, being a tower defense game strategy is key to victory. There’s two groups of enemies with different types of monsters, divided between ground and aerial types. Not all will be easily defeated by abusing one type of tower, some will be annihilated by bombardiers and some others by using ballistas.
You can build towers by gathering coins that drop from enemies or by searching around the trees, same applies for jewels.
By standing with your Tikiman next to a tower it can be upgraded, with every update using this tactic becomes slower and slower, it’s here that jewels become really handy as you can upgrade towers in an instant. If you fail to stop the monsters, if 20 of them reach your home base it’s game over!
There are three islands, unlocking new areas and stages requires you to meet certain goals, in most cases this means completing a perfect stage. There’s a total of 47 stages plus a fourth island that will unlock with a very unique feature, random custom levels. Not too shabby!
There’s a variety of challenges in which you will revisit some of the stages of the regular campaign, some of the challenges include beating a stage without upgrading any tower (if one is upgraded the challenge fails), using only one type of tower to finish a challenge with a certain amount of jewels. This is but the tip of the iceberg as there are tons of challenges to unlock as you progress through the game.
The PC release comes with more achievements, the encore add-on from previous versions and multiplayer and LAN features to play with friends, leaderboards, medals and what not, it’s good to see the developers cared to add content for the HD release and not just a re-release without any changes like some others do.
The game can be played with the mouse and keyboard, fully supports control pads too. The Xbox 360 pad works like a charm, definitely and fearing to sound biased, control pads is the way to go.
Audio
As mentioned before gameplay can be relaxing at times, the music complements this really well, slow paced and relaxing tunes is what you will hear on regular waves and a more serious dread music when a boss approaches.
Graphics
The graphics are colorful and cheerful, something the PixelJunk games are known for. I really like them but they may not be please everyone, if you love the cartoonish look in a game then you are in for a ride.
Downsides
Sometimes stages seem very unforgiving, some waves are brutal. This may be amazingly frustrating for some people, then again it’s all about strategy and learning how to beat a stage, still… this is not everyone’s forte.
If you played this game on the Vita or PSN there’s nothing new to the experience, of course, unless you want to own it on every platform.
Overall
PixelJunk Monsters Ultimate HD delivers addictive and relaxing gameplay that will be hard for you to stop playing it. Good controls, there’s a lot of content, challenges and stuff to unlock. If you like the Tower Defense genre and never played this title before.. you owe it to yourself to play it, it’s absolutely fun with tremendous replay value and I can’t recommend this game enough, buy it as i tell you, you will not regret it.
Giving this game a 9 out of 10!
