After starting its life as a downloadable title for PS3 in 2008, Q Games’ PixelJunk Monsters made its way onto PSP to coincide to with the download-only PSP Go last year. The less we talk about the Go, the better. But anyway, after a couple of months, its price on the Playstation Store was slashed to half of its original $20 price tag. It’s even out on UMD if you’d like a physical copy. Is it worth the price of entry? Read on and find out.
What is PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe, you say? Simply put, it’s a tower defense game, and a damn good one at that. The basic premise has you controlling your avatar, known as a Tikiman, as you construct defense towers out of trees in order to defend your flock and home base from incoming waves of monsters. The game starts out pretty simple in order to ease players in, but you’ll soon find yourself mixing and matching towers in order to deal with the ever-increasing variety of monsters and situations thrown at you.
At the outset, you’ll be given access to some basic tower types such as arrow, cannon, anti-air, and ice towers, with additional ones purchasable with gems dropped by enemies and found around levels. As you open up and complete more stages, you’ll have access to a wider arsenal, but don’t expect to abandon the bread-and-butter tower types. Enemies are varied and have different weaknesses and immunities against certain types of towers, so choose wisely. Later on, you’ll find yourself frantically selling and building towers to deal with monsters shielded against certain damage types. Be quick, and be alert, because once your flock of 20 goes to zero, it’s game over.
PJMD packs in more content than its PS3 big brother, too. For starters, the game includes the additional content from the Encore expansion plus an all-new island with 11 extra stages. Aside from the extra levels, two new towers are also thrown into the fray: the tripwire-like Trap tower and the EXP-generating Gem tower. Add some new monster and boss types, and this is pretty much the definitive version of PixelJunk Monsters.
Clearly, the gameplay here is top-notch. The drive to protect your flock and attempt to perfect the levels will keep you sinking hour after hour into the game. At more extreme cases, you might find yourself rage-restarting (Has that term even been invented yet?) just because a single enemy made it past your painstakingly built defense grid and snatched away one of your cute little wards. To some, this may seem like a negative, but then again, make this game too easy and I’d lose interest in this game pretty quickly.
If the main single player campaign isn’t enough, then you also have medal challenges (accessible through the “Tiki Hut†option in the main menu) to keep you busy. These challenges range from restricting yourself to a certain type of tower for a whole stage to having only four trees to build towers from. Ridiculous? Yes. Impossible? No. Supremely satisfying? Hell yeah. There are neat rewards to be had here – concept art, music, and other neat little trinkets that I can’t spoil await you.
The multiplayer is more or less an added bonus, depending on how important it is to you. The game supports both ad hoc and infrastructure, though sadly, the latter doesn’t support voice chat. There is, however, the TikiSpeak feature which lets you communicate with your partner through stringing together various symbols. It can never stand in for voice chat, but it gets the job done when used properly. As for joining games online, you can more or less easily jump in with a PSN ID and you can even set search parameters for rooms and bookmark the ones you like. The other downside of this, though, is that completed stages in co-op don’t carry over into the single player game. Not really much of a deal breaker, but then again, this would be ridiculously easy to breeze through if they ever let you do that.
As infuriating as the difficulty spikes may become, the overall presentation should be more than enough to keep you from karate chopping your PSP in half. The game’s art direction and graphical style exude that easy-going tropical island charm and cuteness without being overly saccharine. The environments aren’t restricted to tropical settings like I mentioned, though. On the audio side of things, PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe shines. The tunes crafted by Japanese duo Otograph lend themselves well to the soft and easy-to-look-at visuals and at the same time mask the game’s intermittently punishing difficulty. Now, I haven’t heard of Otograph before, but after hearing their stuff in this game, it actually made me want to seek out more of their work. It’s just that good.
So there, whether you get this via PSN or UMD, this is the best tower defense game you can get on PSP. Sure, the challenges may be daunting from time to time (thank goodness for adjustable difficulty, but that’s not saying much), but it’s the satisfaction of the rewards and beating overwhelming odds that’ll keep you plugging away at this charming little title.