Savage Moon Review

While the environments are bland, the art style fits the bleak tone perfectly.

It all makes for a surprisingly addictive but brutally difficult tower defence game. It's very, very hard. Each wave gets increasingly difficult to cope with, as you'd expect, but by the third or so moon, things get a bit too hectic and it's a bit too early on in the game for that to happen. The tutorial and overall production values aren't up to much, either, but you can't really complain when it's this cheap.

Most impressive, however, is the game's overall depressing tone, and it's the art style and audio which contributes most to this. The graphics are minimalist in the extreme, with little to warm the soul. It's a harsh world out there mining moons and surviving against swarms of alien bugs, and the art style rekindles memories of Introversion's similarly bleak Defcon. While the environments are drab, the bugs themselves are well animated and really catch the eye. If they weren't such gits you'd probably admire them. Savage Moon won't win any awards for its looks, but FluffyLogic has done a good job of coming up with a style that reflects the context of the tower defence gameplay.

The audio is best though. It's horrendous, but in a good, uncomfortable way. The shrieks, clicks, croaks, ticks, gurgles and cries of the bugs, not only as they emerge from their pits of doom but also when they're blasted into oblivion by your turrets, are just brutal. And the sound's relentless. With any luck you'll be killing a hell of a lot of bugs so you'll be hearing them constantly. One of them particular is especially awful on your ears, the kind of noise you'd expect a possessed pig to make if it were ever torn to shreds by an automatic rifle.

The noises the bugs make when you kill them are brutal.

And it's all complimented by a wonderfully depressed soundtrack, reminiscent of the original Interplay Fallout games. The solemn, cold and lonely beeps and boops of each mission hammer home the bleakness of what you're doing.

Savage Moon won't be for everyone. It certainly won't be for anyone who doesn't first and foremost enjoy the tower defence genre as a whole. It's great value, offering 12 levels and online leaderboards. The fact that there's no multiplayer, locally or online, is a criticism, as are the quality of the environments, which are a bit bland, but otherwise Savage Moon offers a unique and refreshing counterpoint to the cutesy tower defence games the market seems to be flooded with at the moment.