Savage Moon

Savage Moon is a Tower Defence game from Fuzzy Logic, available on PSP and the Play Station 3 via the PSN. The goal is to shamelessly re-enact any Hold the Line scene from Starship Troopers, err that is to build towers which shoot guns at waves and waves of alien bugs that want to attack your mining facilities. The setting is in the future where humanity is mining asteroids and moons within a system that is populated with an insect race not unlike the Bugs/Zerg/Xenomorphs. The game itself is a good example of how a standard Tower Defence game should be made.

This game provide example of:


 * Bug War: Although the Insectocytes aren't really invading so much as responding to human intrusions.
 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: Implied, the post-level score screens show considerable penalties for letting bugs through to disrupt mining operations even if you repair the damage. There doesn't seem to be any mention of saving lives in the game, just making sure the mines are productive and profitable.
 * Death From Above: The mortar and orbital cannon towers specialise in this, the mortar especially increases dramatically in firepower with upgrades going from being a guy with a tube to gun the size of industrial chimney.
 * Demonic Spiders: Literally with the Tanks and the not as large black and white striped warrior spiders, they are probably the main cause for controller hurling frustration. You at least get some forewarning of them, but the first time you encounter either will definitely result in a loss. Tanks move through walls of towers without slowing down, its impossible for a tower to survive a tank. The black and white spiders will destroy any towers outside of a repair tower's range, and in enough numbers the repair tower won't make a difference anyway.
 * Does This Remind You of Anything?: Although they're aren't any actual references you can't help but be reminded of the Starship Troopers movies.
 * Game Breaker: and a necessary one at that, the Amp tower boosts the range and damage/heal of all towers in range, the damage buff also stacks from multiple Amp towers, but this will ensure you barely survive as opposed to failing horribly.
 * The Anti-Air tower is a lesser gamebreaker, when fully upgraded and paired with a maximised Amp tower, it has a ridiculous range compared to any other tower, being able to almost cover the entire map. With 7 of these paired to an Amp tower all but boss fliers will die shortly seconds after spawning.
 * Goddamn Bats: All fliers to an extent, they draw your towers' attention away from the harder to kill ground bugs. The purple/blue worms and the large spider which births a ton of smaller ones on death are also pretty good goddamn examples.
 * Guide Dang It: The first 2 levels are pretty easy, the third ramps up difficulty, later levels are almost unbeatable even with the right timing of the right type of tower in a specific space, especially because in the later waves near the end of the game, even a single bug going through your defences will trigger a Game Over.
 * Hold the Line: Standard for the genre.
 * Kill Sat: The Orbital Cannon tower is the guidance control for one of these, but for some reason the tower's satellite can only hit things that in a close proximity to the tower, as opposed to hitting anything on the map like other types of Kill Sat.
 * Macross Missile Massacre: When being rushed by hordes of high tier fliers, optimally your AA towers should be offloading this into the sky. In fact an air defence that isn't one of these better have a wall or six of machinegun towers and amp towers.
 * More Dakka: Upgraded towers have noticeably more dakka mounted on them. This applies to the new towers unlocked over the course of the game.
 * Nintendo Hard: This is not a game where you can pass a level on your first attempt. The later levels have their last few waves cause instant failure Space Invaders style if a single Insectocyte gets through.
 * Tower Defence: Fairly standard sci-fi type, the only real innovations are being able to get a first person view from your tower's perspective and drop pods providing a cap to the number of towers you can build at a time.