Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Savage Moon, a downloadable tower defender exclusive to the PlayStation Network, was released earlier this year… but as it is on a 50% discount for another day, I’m only getting to it now.

As a tower defense game, it is pretty much as expected. Giant space bugs attack in waves, and you have to place towers to keep them from reaching your home base. As you progress you unlock new tower types and have new enemies to gun down. Although it feels like the tutorial takes three whole levels, which is a pretty big slice of the game’s twelve. The setting is a series of moons that have been turned into mining operations to keep the human race alive. If too many bugs attack your mining HQ, you lose the level.

The visual Space Poo vibe does not do much for me. But the backstory does contain an intriguing twist in that the moons are considered to be living beings… and the bugs are merely the moon’s white blood cells. So there’s a bit of a conservationist “What Hath Mankind Wrought” angle to it, even if you have to dig into the game’s supplementary materials to learn this.

Unlike the flat 2D PixelJunk Monsters, Savage Moon is full 3D, with reasonable dual-stick camera controls. There is no grid system for placing towers, as you find with some tower defense games. The land-based bugs are limited to certain paths – although some levels have very, very wide “paths” – and you are largely confined to building on the path walls. Although a blocking tower can be placed over certain intersections to impede the aliens, and that never fails to tick them off. Perhaps the coolest feature is the ability to jump inside a tower for a first-person perspective on the zerg rush. Savage Moon has about a dozen Trophies, several of which are not hard at all to collect.

Had I bought Savage Moon for $10, I may have felt it was a little anemic. With only twelve levels (there is a Vengeance Mode that pits you against infinite enemy waves), no multiplayer, and a more-or-less ugly aesthetic, Savage Moon doesn’t seem quite as robust as PixelJunk Monsters. But $5 is a very nice price for a serviceable tower defender. We’ll see if I feel the game steps up the value as I spend more time with it.