My 2 big issues with PixelJunk Monsters.
PixelJunk Monsters is a fantastic game. I recently got the expansion for it and I’m enjoying it much as I did the original game. It’s probably my favorite game on the PSN as of right now but there are two things about it that piss me off and makes it difficult for me to play the game and really enjoy it. I suppose it’s two things that are inherent of the tower defense genre but they’re big annoyances nonetheless.
Read on as I whine some more.
1) Trial and error gameplay- To put it simply: you can’t come up with a strategy if you don’t know what’s coming down the line. The Wave Gauge is only useful in looking two waves ahead and telling you what kind of enemy you’ll be facing so you can’t plan on which paths to strengthen or how much firepower you’ll need until that particular wave is upon you. Worse yet, the Wave Gauge will tell you if an enemy is shielded or not but it won’t tell you if it’s shielding against elemental towers or regular towers so this information ends up being completely useless because you can’t plan on which towers to build or research until, again, the wave is upon you. Speaking of research, let’s say I have 13 gems and I see that the next two waves are regular grunts. I’ll think “OK, maybe it’s going to be a lot of them” so I play it safe and use those gems to research a fire tower. What happens? The very next wave after that is of the flying fat monsters against which basically all towers but lasers are useless. I don’t have any more gems to research a laser tower so I’m screwed and will be forced to play the stage again. How was I supposed to know? During the first few stages you can make educated guesses and smart decisions to get through a level on your first try but this becomes rather impossible later on in the game. You’ll need to replay those stages 2, 3, even 4 times before you even manage to get through it, let alone rainbow it. I like to play games where, when I lose, I know that it was because I did something wrong as opposed to losing because I didn’t have enough information to win. In short, the constant memorization of waves, trial and error and replaying of levels is a very frustrating aspect of this game to say the least.
2) NOT pick-up and play friendly- I don’t have the attention span for long-winded RPGs anymore. I’ve grown to like more arcadey games that I can pick up and play for as little as 10 minutes to as long as a few hours. PixelJunk Monsters is, unfortunately, not that kind of game. To get any sense of accomplishment in this game you need to play it for one hour at the very least. This is because (and this ties back to my previous complaint) you’ll need to replay a single stage at least twice before you can beat it and at least double that number if you want to rainbow it. You can’t try to beat a level once and leave it at that because if you do, you’ll probably forget what you did wrong the first time or the number/type of enemies you’ll be seeing and you’ll probably fail when you come back to it for a second try. So yeah, you have to sit there and replay the same level 2-4 times so that the elusive strategy you need to beat that one wave that is giving you trouble sharpens into view and is crystal clear in your head when you go for the kill. Leave the game and come back to it after a day and you’ll pretty much have to start over from zero. Add to that the fact that your average level in PixulJunk Monsters will take anywhere from 10 to 20+ minutes to complete and it’s easy to see why this is so frustrating. You can’t speed up the arrival of your next wave like you can in some other tower defense games either (not that you’d want to since whatever free time you have in between waves is best spent upgrading towers anyway) so if any given level is, say, 20 minutes long, it will always be 20 minutes long. You can’t go in with the attitude that you’ll “play this game for 10 minutes or so” with PixelJunk Monsters. The second you start playing it, you’re in for the long haul.
I’m not a game designer so I don’t have a real solution for either of these issues. As I said, they seem to be problems that are inherent of the game’s genre, but they are problems nonetheless and, by God, they can make this game so hard to play at times.
Still an awesome game though.
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