PixelJunk Monsters 2: Review

At some point it might seem that the studio Q-Games going through dark times. For many years, she released niche, but beloved arcade games in narrow circles – and suddenly decided to devote as many as five years to creating an experimental The Tomorrow Children. Even during beta testing of the game, it was clear that the team was creating something unintelligible and very strange, and the audience was not convinced – already 10 months after the launch of the project, it was announced that the servers would be closed.

Fortunately, nothing bad happened, and Q-Games returned to what she does best – creating a variety of games in the series PixelJunk. Although personally I would be glad to continue PixelJunk Shooter, release PixelJunk Monsters 2 I didn’t want to miss it either. Still, few people play in the tower defense genre outside of mobile platforms these days, and sometimes you really want to play something like this without microtransactions and pop-up ads.

Protecting the Innocent

The essence of the sequel is the same as its predecessor. Evil monsters have attacked the Tiki forest, and defenseless chibis can die in the blink of an eye if the brave leader Tikiman does not help them. Taking control of it, you will go to several regions and complete 15 levels, in each of which you need to protect the chibis standing with pillars at the entrance to your house. If a monster flies up to the building and even touches the crowd of inhabitants, you will lose one of the 20 “lives” and worsen the result.

What to do to protect those under your care?? There is only one option – to place defensive towers at the edge of the road along which monsters walk. Chikiman owns magic that allows him to turn any tree into a weapon, as he did in the first part. But with the transition to 3D, the number of trees has increased significantly, and therefore the construction of a building in the place of one tree leads to the destruction of several standing next to it.

Therefore, the player not only saves gold used to purchase structures, but also must monitor the number of trees in potentially active zones. Not all towers are equally useful – they are divided into three categories, and if one of them is useful in the fight against any monsters, then the rest are used either against flying monsters or against running ones. Buildings related to air defense will stand idle, even if a dozen spiders run past them. And the mortar will not throw cannonballs at bats and other winged evil spirits. It is always worth having money in reserve for at least one ballista – its arrows can fly at any opponents, and if one of them runs past all the towers and kills a chibi any minute, you will still be able to save the situation.

Mostly money drops from defeated https://looselinescasino.co.uk/login/ opponents, and in calm moments you can try shaking all the trees around you in the hope that some more coins will fall from them. Some buildings additionally require gems – you need to get them in the same ways: by destroying monsters and looking for them in the foliage. Typically, structures that require both currencies are the strongest, but if you spend gold exclusively on towers, then there are other uses for the stones.

The most important of them is improving defensive structures. All of your ballistas, mortars, cannons and large hives have experience bars that fill up when finishing off enemies. You can speed up the process with stones or by standing near any of the towers without pressing any buttons – in this case Tikiman will begin to perform a dance and strengthen the buildings. Unfortunately, in PixelJunk Monsters 2 there is no detailed list of improvements – if a gun has been upgraded to the second level, you will not always understand how it now differs from a regular one. But sometimes the changes are obvious – for example, machine guns for killing flying monsters, upon reaching the fourth level, fire without pause, which makes them very dangerous.

If leveling up from the first to the second level takes a matter of seconds, then from the fourth to the fifth (maximum) experience it will take a lot. Especially considering that by that time there will be a dozen more towers standing near this tower and they all need improvement. And the conditions in different regions differ: already in the second, the monsters will stop dropping coins altogether (fortunately, not forever), and at later stages monsters will begin to appear, which must first be shot down with air defense towers, after which they will throw cannonballs from a mortar.

There is one more subtlety – all levels are divided into several stages, and after each you receive bonus gold depending on how much money is in your inventory. If you spent every penny, then you’ll give them pennies as a gift. This forces the player to approach their finances wisely – not to place more towers than required in the first stages. And most of all in PixelJunk Monsters 2 I’m surprised by the well-balanced difficulty: when you feel a lack of gold, it’s only your fault – you didn’t receive additional coins on time and distributed the towers unevenly across all paths.

Defense difficulties

One of the main disadvantages of the sequel is the inability to look at the entire level at once. You can’t move the camera away, but no one forbids you to move it using the stick, and, in my opinion, this is quite enough. If enemies are off the screen, this will be reported in time, and missed coins and gems will also remind you of themselves until they disappear. Problems can arise only at a higher level of difficulty – each mission has three of them, and on the second and third the monsters walk in completely different paths than on the first.

It’s a little annoying to have to replay the mission from the beginning if you fail. The fact is that to access the new location you need to collect several rainbows, and they are awarded for the perfect completion of levels on any difficulty. For a perfect passage, you need to save all the chibis – as soon as a monster approaches them, you can immediately press pause and restart the mission. And when this happens on the 10th or 14th wave, it’s damn disappointing to lose – not so much because of your sluggishness, but because of the need to repeat all the previous stages of defense.

On the other hand, through trial and error, over time you will begin to place towers even more effectively and approach their improvement wisely, and at the same time remember which monsters walk or fly along which paths. There is no random generation here – what the ninth wave was like last time is what it will be like when it restarts. Taking into account the varied conditions, maps that are different from each other and the lack of a large supply of coins, I didn’t get tired of going through the levels, but it’s still a pity that they didn’t add a little more of them.

The mediocre progression system is also disappointing – from time to time you will be given a special currency for building and improving a certain number of towers, hundreds and thousands of killed opponents, and much more. And you can only spend this money on masks for the main character and on a shield behind his back. Since the player is not limited in anything in terms of purchases, he can immediately choose the things he likes and forget about this store forever. As a result, the currency will continue to accumulate indefinitely, if the “achievement” for acquiring all the items does not interest you.

But play PixelJunk Monsters 2 still interesting. And it’s nice to look at her – the magicians from Q-Games They know a lot about stylish pictures, so their world turned out to be bright and cozy. The sequel didn’t bring anything new to the genre or the series (if you don’t count the transition to 3D as an innovation), but at the same time it has enough depth that you wouldn’t mind spending a few pleasant evenings with it. And the increased difficulty levels will challenge even longtime tower defense fans, even though they will be angry about having to start the level over again after a fatal error.

Pros: a good game in the forgotten tower defense genre; a fascinating process of building and strengthening towers; balanced difficulty; nice graphics.

Cons: few levels; missions can be very long, and losing at the very end is always a little disappointing; stupid cosmetic items.