Eurogamer Expo: Savage Moon

Last week here on the blog, I talked about Tom Clancy's EndWar and how it was using voice control to switch up the old RTS game mechanics. But that wasn't the only strategy game we got our hands on at the Eurogamer Expo (E2?), oh no! Savage Moon is a tower defence game, like PixelJunk Monsters, that swaps the cutesy graphics and 2D view for space insects and lots of grey.

Savage Moon is quite a different beast to Q Games' beautiful cult classic. Savage Moon is set on a 'moon' being used for mining of minerals. And whaddya know, some 'savage' creatures who inhabit the aforementioned moon are none too happy about this. But you don't really need a decent backstory with these sorts of games: long story short, bad creatures go round map and attack your base - stop them.

Really, if you want to know how the game works, just read anything ever written about tower defence games, but there is one feature that I haven't seen pop up elsewhere recently: as well as putting towers on high ground, you can also put them down in the path of oncoming creatures. The advantage of this is that you can sort of herd the creatures round a certain way to take out more of them before they get to your base. The flip side of this, of course, is that the creatures just might take a liking to your nice vulnerable tower and destroy the crap out of it. Its an intruiging concept, and was interesting to toy around with in the time I spent with the game and its overly controlling Sony handler, but whether it can actually make that much of a difference to become a regular feature in rounds I don't yet know.

There were a couple of issues that I had with the game that developer FluffyLogic needs to iron out prior to the games planned Q1 2009 release. Although I didn't experience any erratic crashes, the controller had a knack of randomly disconnecting (I was told this was a known bug, explaining why this game had a handler unlike the others at the Expo), and the menus need to be a bit more responsive to deal with the fast-paced play styles of lots of RTSers. But, there's plenty of time for this to be worked out, and I have high hopes for the game when it gets released to the PlayStation Network at the beginning of next year.