Quick Look: PixelJunk Monsters 2

The progression stuff turns me off this, but with Bloons 6 out, I'm set for tower defense for a while.

Didn't the original pixeljunk monsters also open up new paths based off getting perfects?? I guess I didn't love that about it, but I came to accept it.

Looks as tedious as the first one.

A game this polished looking shouldn't have so many design flaws :(.

Not being able to see the entire map like you could in the first one makes me not want this.

I remember liking the look of the first game a lot but absolutely hating that game after spending only an hour or two with it. I can't quite remember why, but I'm starting to think it was a lot of the same issues Brad has with this one, which is a shame since it's got a fantastic look.

I think my favorite TD game is still the original Defense Grid. I remember it having a lot of smart design decisions like mid-mission checkpoints that you can reload at any time, fast forward, and the orbital laser (oh crap button) with a long cool down in the event you get overwhelmed.

If I experienced what Brad mentioned where you miss a perfect with one enemy sneaking through, I feel that would lead me to lose patience with this game pretty quickly.

Those fruits look like a bit of a game changer, and I wish they had looked at all the descriptions. If you can quickly plant those to deal with monsters straying off the regular path or slow them down and give you time to make more towers that could help a lot with some of those unexpected waves. My biggest problem with the first one is that money was always so tight and towers didn't do much damage it always felt like I was just barely eking out a win. It also felt like there was some RNG factor at work when an enemy would sneak by with a tiny sliver of health.

TD are fun, but this one just looks tedious. WTH were they thinking with 'perfect only'?

PS: my favourite TD must be this DSi title:

That's a shame a game with visuals as great as these is part of a genre I got bored of some +5 years ago.

I'd rather just play plants vs zombies on my phone again tbh

The best tower defense are still games from the flash era

Yeah I just could NOT get into this game. I loved PJM 1 quite a bit. This one, yeah I don't even know what it is but I can't get into it. Sucks because I love the way it looks and love the gameplay changes they've made.

Hate PixelJunk Monsters. Love PixelJunk Shooters.

The design choices in this game are all so baffling and frustrating. Just like the original so I guess its understandable.

Gem TD in Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 remains my favorite tower defense game.

The only TD games worth really playing are WC3 TD maps, I forget so many of the good ones :( Some of them were so difficult too. I think Skibi was pretty good, any of them that required mazing is where it's at.

If anyone's looking for a fun modern Tower Defense game, maybe give X-Morph a try! It's my personal favorite TD with Defender's Quest and Defense Grid.

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure Brad's complaint with this game (needing perfects in levels to proceed, basically having to replay levels in order to even have a chance of getting a perfect) was the exact same in the first game.

I liked the first game, but never got even to the half way point because of the issue Brad is having here. It was just brutal without purpose.

Having gotten the platinum for this game, I will say that I did not like it as much as the first. The art is way cooler but not being able to see the whole map and having to chase down coins that rolled downhills was really annoying. I also had some infuriating bugs. One being that there would be frame stutters that would cause cannonballs to disappear mid-air and not hit the targets.

@ssully: Yep, I really wanted to like Monsters 1, but the game was jarringly brutal with its requirements for a tower defense game. i remember perfecting levels and needing to replay levels to learn paths because it conveys enemy routes poorly.

C'mon Brad, they're cactuses, not trees. C'mon...

the best tower defense game is Ninjatown for DS and it's not close

I can’t watch more of Brad just running around not dancing on his towers. You need to be tower dancing 100% of the time you’re not building.

These are the best I know and I really do like the genre. I generally get pretty annoyed about paid ones because they rarely do anything that is more impressive than the many, many free ones out there. Still, there are good ones.

Free:
Gemcraft
Desktop Defense
Vector TD

Not free:
Unstoppable Gorg
Space Run
Dungeon Warfare

I wanted to like it but... :

-Towers look all the same at every level

-Dancing takes foreeeever

-Change of route is completely crazy

-Rainbow system and replaying of levels is too repetitive

-on the contrary - music is amazing

I'm with Ben and Brad, I love me some tower defense. Perfect podcast games.

Also, this looks bad.

I've never found a tower defense game that struck the same cord with me that the various Wintermaul mods for Warcraft III did. I don't think this one will either.

Vector Tower Defence was the best TD game, it was flash tho and never came to steam.

I bought this to play on a flight when it first released. Let's just say I did not play it on the return flight.

@vampire_chibi: Is that the same game released on PS3 as a PS Mini? I remember getting a Vector graphic TD game for free on Plus and enjoying it.

I loved the first PixelJunk Monsters, played the hell out of it in couch co-op mode. The "perfect" requirement for advancement seems awful, and I really dislike that you can't opt for an broader, full-map view.

I’m still fucking pissed at Sony for killing Q-Games’s The Tomorrow Children.

A PC patch a couple of weeks ago added the ability to zoom out completely (but can’t move) and view the entire map, and you can also zoom out further and increase your fov in the default view. Big improvement.

I don’t mind the emphasis on rainbows, you don’t have to nail everything to gain enough to progress.

@admiral_crunch: It seems to be the same, altho i feel like it was in a different colorscheme, in the one i remember it wasn't this tron-like style, also you could create different towers by placing other towers near eachother and they would affect eachothers abilities, it was pretty dope.

EDIT : I was completely wrong in what i remembered, no the game was actual Onslaught 2, the best fucking tower defense game ever made.

Same here. i loved the Pixeljunk games in theory, (not Pixeljunk Racers, i skipped that); but never get through any of them... I bought Eden, Monster, and Shooter. I got about 1/3 or 1/2 through Monster and just couldn't get any further. Too hard/frustrating. I started Eden but was surprised they didn't have an easy "chill out mode". (It was kind of hard to the point I didn't enjoy it, but still wanted to "experience it"; it was really pretty). I emailed Q-Games to make the suggestion to add that mode and I'm pretty sure Dylan Cuthbert himself answered me back, (wish i kept the email!), and he was SUPER RUDE. basically said "if you don't like my game how we made it, don't fucking play it". I was like, "oooookay, sorry I hit a sore spot, can you send me my money back then?" And of course I got no reply. I decided never to buy a Q-Games game again after that...

I totally understand why people dislike the perfect scheme in PJM. It flies in the face of tower defense norms and it's very frustrating to lose by 1 monster.

However, the first PJM was a lot of fun and the 'perfect' was a big part of that. The design intends for you to play the same level multiple times consecutively; learning each waves pattern, optimal timing for building and upgrading towers and demanding fast on your feat running around to fill gaps. Some will find this boring (fair enough!). Other players will enjoy the slow accumulation of lessons towards mastery of a level. Mastering concepts before you move on to bigger more complicated arenas is crucial to help teach players the tricks they need for 'high-level' end game play in PJM. Without these restrictions the game would be a big open sandbox with very loose boundaries and a seemingly impossible final difficulty curve.

Keep in mind you do not have to 'perfect' every level on hard before you can progress - often beating 40-60% of the available levels is enough to unlock more content.

PixelJunk games tend to reject traditional stat-based grinding wherein player's reduce the challenge of the game simply by playing more. This is great because it's a huge irony that many strategy games reward the most enthusiastic players (who tend to want the greatest challenge and who engage deepest with the mechanics) by making everything less challenging thereby lowering the necessary level of play.