Strange Wilderness
Savage Moon throws a little Starship Troopers at our tower defense genre and we likey.
Published: February 6, 2009
It's weird, too because for all the game's little issues, there's a fairly solid little balancing act done here. The moment you set foot in the second of the game's three nebulae (which each contain four planets for a total of a dozen actual levels), the difficulty spikes quickly, and it really does become a careful act of setting up the right turrets in the right places and upgrading them judiciously (which looks pretty damned cool, by the way -- both in how they look when upgrading/finish and when the fire with progressively more intense attacks; watching Anti-Air Towers go from a glorified shotgun to a multi-missle-launching death bringer is amazing). Being able to shift bonuses around could very well have broken the game, but instead it almost becomes crucial in the later levels. At the very least, it can be a last-ditch move to save your base from getting invaded.
The levels themselves are, generally speaking, just palette swaps with new layouts. That's fine, really, as the focus is on cleverly placing defenses rather than it all looking pretty, but perhaps just a bit more variety would've been nice. That you can only place your turrets on flat ground and mountains means there's decent potential to mix things up a little more, but it's really just different colors and paths on every level.
It's hardly a huge deal, and as a downloadable title, Savage Moon isn't an especially ugly title; the Starship Troopers[i] vibe is overwhelming, but that's certainly a good thing, and all the enemies look quite nice with their shiny carapaces, twitching mandibles and skittering claw-like legs. When anything, be it turret or enemy, is destroyed, they tend to pop out of the world with minimal fanfare (perhaps a small explosion or mist o' blood), but by the end of the game, you won't have time to admire how enemies die, just that they [i]do actually die before getting to your base. The framerate, too, is mostly solid, though it would appear that whenever the game is loading or buffering things in the background, a bit of stuttering can occur. This almost always happens during the level-starting fly-bys (which you have to sit through even after restarting, and that's also after sitting through a short loading screen, which just add insult to injury in a trial-and-error game like like), but when you're actually plugging away at enemies, it does a great job of keeping up.
One of the bigger reasons why the game has some punch to it is the audio -- and in particular the effects work. The early Anti-Air turrets let loose with what can only be described as a "death burp," a punchy, booming sound that actually lets you feel its ability to drop air targets. Full-upgraded Machine Gun Towers do the same, spitting dozens of rounds out of their multiple barrels and into screeching, squeaking overgrown bugs with gusto. The driving, almost tribal sound of the music, rich with percussion, does a great job of filling everything out.
Savage Moon isn't the most balanced, perfect tower defense game out there, but it is a hell of a lot of fun, fairly different from the other attempts out there and certainly offers plenty of challenge... even if some of that falls by the wayside when you've got a stack of Machine Guns, a few Repair Towers and a fully-upgraded Amp Tower laying waste to anything that gets in range. At $10, the game should provide plenty of fun for a few days or even weeks, and I'm quite glad there's a little competition for PixelJunk Monsters out there.
