Savage Moon: The Hera Campaign review
Savage Moon is a PS3 & PSP tower defense game that sees you protecting a remote, off-world mining facility from attack by Insectocytes, a type of carnivorous creature inhabiting the planets. The mission is to strategically place an array of upgradeable, defensive weapons in the way of the nasty insectoid enemies. There is a range of towers, from rapid-fire machine guns to support towers such as the chaos tower. Anyone who has ever played any form of tower defense game before knows the score.
Menu screen can look a little cluttered
Progression means fighting off bigger, increasingly powerful hordes of awfully nasty looking insect creatures with a bevy of ever-increasingly powerful arrays of weaponry and tactical structures (the first of which is a block that can re-direct the route of the enemies).
Fans of Starship Troopers or, at a stretch, Aliens (as in, the second Alien movie in the quadrilogy) will be familiar with the harsh, browny landscape and strange looking insect-like enemies. This is a solid tower defense game too, though arguably the creative fun and graphical style of Field Runners is more suited to a platform like the PSP.
Hera Campaign furthers the PS3 title on the PSP exclusively. The Hera Campaign (named after the Aegophagus or “goat eating” aspect of the Greek goddess of the same name) is set within a huge gathering of Imoons, the Hera Cluster, that drifted into human space. Preliminary intelligence suggests that it consists of, at least, 20 Imoons populated by a rich variety of Insectocyte forms, some of which we have encountered before and some of which are new.
The game is quite brown. Like DOOM on a PSP...
It all seems very promising, and while the graphics aren’t the most beautiful on the PSP, they’re nothing to turn your nose up to. The tutorial section at the start, however, is annoying. Consistently throwing up context menu after context menu, you’re tempted to turn off and leave the PSP alone before you frustratingly plough it into a nearby wall.
Once the gameplay picks up though, it becomes a very solid tower defense game akin to most others.
This is a very solid game and worthy of your euro’s, though perhaps fans of the PS3 game and it’s accompanying DLC content will benefit from understanding the back story a bit more. It’s good sci-fi fun that takes itself a little too seriously at times, but a decent back story and good gameplay is nothing to turn down. However, if you were to choose between this, Field Runners or Pixel Junk Monsters, this would probably be last on the list.
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