What if Fisher Price Monsters Smashed Your House?
Kaiju Panic
Kaiju Panic is nifty remix of the tower defense genre that initially drew my attention with its charming Fisher Price-esque style and luckily the game play held up too.
After some wordless amusing slideshow picture book style intro's you are put in charge of a defense force that needs to repel a giant monster invasion. This primarily revolves around moving your little commander man through the small maps and performing various tasks.
You will need to find and rescue various people (who each have small and often funny biography) in each level (and carry over to the next level - building up your civilian work force). You will need to build factories to harvest the purple ore that is the games currency, which you then will use to build various defenses - which mostly take the form of weapon bunkers that you can assign up to 4 of your civilians to man - making them more effective. The entire time you are doing this you are working against the clock until the kaiju start to appear.
The kaiju come in a huge variety. At the start of the game you are introduced to a few cute red bouncing blob types and as the game progresses each level will have more types, green burrowing louse bugs, weird bee kaiju and more. Each family of kaiju come in 3 different "sizes" - requiring different tactics and weapons to deal with. The various family of kaiju is easily identified by their color and distinctive look. Remembering which weapon bunkers are good versus which monsters is the real trick as their is no way to check during a game - you have to wait till you can go to you laboratory in between. As the levels go on more varied types will appear in each level forcing you to mix and match tactics on the fly.
The kaiju are all hell bent on wrecking your HQ in each level and will follow a path from the edge of the screen towards it - smashing everything along the way. This is the only way way to "loose" - by letting your HQ get smooshed by bouncing monsters. Figuring our where and when to place your defensive turrets (which you can only drop onto the map close to your general man) force your to run around the levels never quite moving as fast as you want and always feeling on the verge of panic. Speaking of panic if a kaiju smashes a turret full of civilians or just comes close to them they will all freak out and run around randomly for a bit - forcing you to chase after them and pick them up again.
Once you have completed a level by successfully repelling the kaiju (there are other level based bonus optional requirements as well if you are interesting in "golding up") you return to your laboratory and can spend the research points you earned during the last mission (these points are dropped by the monsters you defeat). Unlocking more turret types, upgrading them, buying advanced abilities for your general are all on the shopping list. It's tough because everything sounds good, research points are limited and you aren't sure how useful something may be until you can try it out. In the laboratory you can also see the descriptions of each kaiju you have defeated and what weapon works best against them, as well as the previously mentioned civilian bios.
I am only about half way through the game at the point of this writing. The game is broken up into 6 sections (by world area - europe, asia, africa, etc) with each section having 5 missions, the final mission features a huge boss kaiju and a mandate to evacuate the civilians recovered from that world area. A mission only takes 15-20 minutes to play but often it will take multiple plays to figure out a strategy to beat it. At certain spots it has seemed to have a little grind - I felt I had to go back and play previous missions to earn more research for upgrades in order to effectively beat the current mission - but I think that might be more on my method of playing than actually mandatory.
I found Kaiju Panic to be a fun bite sized game. It's almost a phone/tablet game in style but the controls would be too much for touch I think. I am going to keep playing through the missions and quite enjoy it.
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