Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party on Pixeljunk Monsters, but since I bought it from the Playstation Network store, I’ve been playing it constantly. It’s like crack. Not that I’d know what crack is like. What I mean to say is that the game is pretty damn addictive, and the demo’s free. We bought a second controller and my wife and I now play the game together in co-op mode whenever we have spare time. The great thing is that co-op is actually just a bit easier.

But it’s not exactly an easy game. I find myself playing certain levels over and over, trying to get that rainbow rating for completing a level without losing a single villager. It’s really sad when some cute village kid gets carried away by a giant bloated bee or crushed to death by Stompy the Golden Idol.

Amazingly, I tend to get worse the longer I play. On my first run, I’ll make it up to the thirteenth wave before a spider sneaks into the village and I immediately restart the game. Then I’ll make it up to wave six, where I’ll fail to stop a golem. On my next run, I’ll lose a guy on wave two. It’s infuriating!

But I’ve picked up a few things along the way. I’ve now rainbowed ten of the game’s levels, and I’ve only got the hardest level in the game left to complete, then the “Encore” expansion awaits. I’m hoping that I can help others avoid some of the angst that I’ve felt struggling through the game. All this week, I’ll be dishing out advice on how to ace the game. This first segment deals with general gameplay strategies.
For starters, cannons are best for taking out acorns and golems, while arrows are best for taking out spiders. Spiders are fast, and tend to dodge away from cannon blasts and not really get hit, whereas the arrows just seem to bounce off golems.

Never group your cannons closely together. It’s much better to stagger them, allowing some space between each cannon. If two cannons are placed right next to each other, they may fire in quick succession such that the first cannonball kills a monster, but the second cannonball is already in the air, and is thus wasted.

When placing towers, pay close attention to the range indicator. That dotted red line shows how far the tower can reach. You should place towers at corners where they can reach all the way around, or in the center of a dividing line of trees so that they can hit monsters on both sides. When choosing tower placement, keep in mind that some towers can have their range upgraded so as to eventually reach a bit further than what you see initially. This is especially true with arrows and tesla towers.

Place a few arrow towers near your village, as they can be very effective at picking off stragglers who’ve been weakened by earlier attacks.

Dancing to upgrade towers is valuable, but you should understand how it works in order to use it correctly. It takes 18 seconds to upgrade a brand new tower from green to yellow, but to bring it from there to red takes another 33 seconds. The dance times required get longer and longer, but towers will also upgrade themselves marginally with each kill shot. Never spend a gem to upgrade a tower when the progress bar is near the top. Instead, dance on it to upgrade, since at that point it shouldn’t take long. You may only have to dance 5 or 10 seconds to get it to the next level. You can press L1 to reveal the update progress of all towers on the screen. It can also be a good idea to wait until coins and gems begin to flash before moving to collect them, so as to maximize the amount of time you spend dancing to upgrade a tower.

Don’t upgrade arrow towers. All upgrades except the final one improve nothing but range, and if placed well, arrows usually have good enough range at the start to reach any monsters.

On the “easy” levels, don’t buy any special towers at all. You generally won’t need them, and gems are much scarcer in the easy levels.

On each level, there are coins and one gem hidden in random trees. If you touch a tree where something is hidden, it will fly out and you can collect it. Time is often better spent dancing on towers than running around touching every tree, but if it’s not too far out of your way, hit a few extra trees. Especially if you need gold.

Near the end of a level, watch the meter at the bottom to see what enemies are coming next. If you can tell that there will be no more flying enemies for the rest of the level, sell any anti-air or laser towers you have. Selling purple towers will get you a gem in addition to the money, and selling black towers gets you two gems. By this point in the game, gems are more valuable than gold.

The number of coins you drop when hit by monsters increases with each wave: if you get hit during wave 2, you’ll only drop 20 coins, but if you get hit by a monster on wave 18, you’ll drop 180 coins! Needless to say, it becomes increasingly important to avoid being hit as each game progresses.

Starting during the medium levels, some monsters will be shielded. Before the wave of monsters appears on-screen, you can’t tell from the upcoming MonsterMeter what type of shield they’ll have. It’s even difficult to tell once they do appear. It only becomes obvious what color their shield is once a monster is hit by an attack – you’ll then see the shield glowing red, blue, or green. Those are the three different color shields, and you’ll need to know what each does in order to best attack the shielded monsters. Green shields protect against cannon and mortar fire, but are very vulnerable to attack from fire and tesla towers. Blue shields resist cannon, mortar, and ice towers, but are especially vulnerable to fire. And red shields, which are my own least favorite, resist fire and tesla towers, but are vulnerable to cannon and mortar attack.

Many levels have areas with water. If coins are dropped by monsters, by you getting hit by a monster, or by selling a tower, they can fall into the water and will be lost. There will be times when you have no choice but to lose coins this way, but be mindful where you can.

Section two comes later this week, and will deal with the different types of towers and how to best use them.

So, Mercenaries 2 dropped on Sunday, and with it, seamless drop in, drop out cooperative play.  Basically, by default, when you’re playing, any one on your Friends List can just pop on into your game and help you blow stuff up.  On paper, it sounds great but in reality, it’s kind of unsettling.

I was playing on Monday night, just doing my thing, racing to make some money, when there was a message on the top of the screen that one of my friends had joined my game.  I didn’t have my headset on and I was in the middle of a race with cash on the line, so I couldn’t stop to get it.  Instead I just finished my race while he did something or other.  Awkward.

Once the race was finished, I put the headset on and we were good to go, but before that, it was kind of strange. I didn’t ask him to join, and while having him there was lots of fun and very helpful, it’s not like I needed the help either.  Having someone be able to just pop into your game unannounced is somewhat unsettling, even more so to a hermit like myself.  It’s like getting up from the TV to grab some chips, and when you come back,  your neighbor is sitting in your couch.  You may like the guy, but that doesn’t mean you just want him there watching TV with you.

At the same time though, these people are on your Friends List for a reason, so why not have them just drop by and help you blow up buildings?  After all, the purpose of Live is for you to be able to play with others, and here’s a game that makes it as simple and unobtrusive as possible.  Shouldn’t this be a good thing.  Yeah, I guess, but when you’re like me, and the notion of picking up a phone and talking to someone is enough of a break in your solitary routine to cloud your entire day, having you appear unannounced in an attack chopper is enough to cause fits.

Yeah, I can change the setting so that only I can invite you, or that no one can ever join, but in doing that, I feel like I’d be dismissing all of the hard work done to make such a great system.  Plus, I probably should play more with others as a complete withdrawal from human contact isn’t good for anyone, especially someone who shares a house with three other humans.  So for now, I’ll leave the settings at the default, which means that when I’m tearing up Venezuela, others can pop in and help with the destruction.  Just, if you plan on joining, knock first.  And bring chips.