It seems like every online guide calls most of the monsters by different names. The names I’ll use here are mostly in keeping in line with what you’ll see in other guides, but nobody seems to know what to call the simplest, weakest enemy in the game: the small white circle with arms and legs. I’ve heard them called ants, acorns, kuri, and puffs. I always thought they looked a bit like pandas. After taking a very close look at them, you can see that they’re actually acorns with arms and legs, wearing that big white mask that all the game’s monsters have. So I’m calling them acorns. The other name that’s hard to put a finger on is the weakest of the fliers: a small acorn-looking thing with pink maple seed pods for wings. Sometimes it looks almost helicopter-like. For lack of a better name, I’ll refer to these things as fliers.

Acorns
The big white round acorns are the most common of enemies. Early in the game, cannons are your best defense, along with an arrow tower or two near the village to pick off injured stragglers. Later, you’ll find that fire or tesla towers take these guys down like dynamite does tadpoles. Mortars are also very effective.

Spiders
Spiders are the fastest enemy in the game, and that’s what makes them so damn tough. Your cannons can sometimes do a bit of damage, but spiders are good at dodging cannon fire. Arrows are the most surefire method for killing spiders. Later on, fire and tesla towers also work very well.

Golems
The token slow-moving blobs of hit points, golems can take a lot of punishment. Cannons are by far your best bet early in the game, as arrows do practically nothing to golems. later in the game, buy fire, tesla, or mortar towers to take down the golems.

Flyers
The easiest of the flying monsters to deal with, these flying maple acorn things will generally succumb to a couple anti-air towers. Placing a few arrow towers close to your village will help to assure that none sneak through. Later in the game, you’ll find that lasers cut through them like a chainsaw through rotted gauze.

Bats
Bats are the fastest of the flying monsters. Anti-air towers work well, but if you can line up a laser just right, it’s even better.

Bees
The big, fat, slow-moving bees are nearly invulnerable to arrows and anti-air towers. The only way you really stand a chance of stopping them is by using lasers.

Stompy the Golden Idol
He’s the boss of easy levels, and he really likes to stomp things. So I’ve named him Stompy McStomperson. He’s big, he’s golden, and he’d like nothing better than to stomp his way over to your village and stomp everyone there into flat nasty villager goo. Gold is a soft metal, but arrows will still bounce off. Fire towers and cannons are your best bet. On the easy levels, you likely won’t often be buying tesla towers and mortars, but they work too.

Mumford Mossback the Mean-spirited Misanthrope
On the medium levels, you get Mumford Mossback. He moves faster than Stompy, largely due to the fact that he’s got actual movable legs. He’s also a bit tougher. Use lots and lots fire towers. Cannons and tesla towers also help, as do mortars when you need extra range.

Horace the Nightmare Snail
Ironically, it’s the snail boss in this game who moves most quickly. Horace is a big jerk. Don’t underestimate him – he’s the toughest creature in the game. Pelt him with all the fire towers, mortars, and cannons you can. No mercy, or he’ll do unspeakable things to your villagers.

In part one of this article, I discussed general gameplay strategies. Now, let’s take a closer look at the game’s individual towers. For your convenience, I’ve also created a printable pdf quick reference guide. Yeah, it’s really ugly – I know.

Arrow Tower

The only tower in the game (other than a hive) that can hit both flying and ground enemies, the arrow tower remains useful throughout the game. It’s especially useful at the beginning, as it’s the only way you’ll prevent waves of spiders from getting through. They also work very well when placed near your village as a last resort to pick off wounded monsters that have made it past your other defenses.

Every upgrade except the final upgrade to black is merely a range upgrade, so it’s generally not worth it to spend the gems or the time dancing in upgrading an arrow tower.

Cannon Tower
Cannon towers are the only power weapons you’ll have available early in the game, before fire and mortar towers become available. Later in a level, although they’ll do less damage than fire, tesla, or mortar towers, they’ll still be the backbone of your defense since you’ll have so many built. The greatest flaws of cannon towers is their short range and slow rate of fire.

You have to be very careful when positioning cannons. If they’re too close together, they may both fire at a single monster that could have been killed by one attack, thereby wasting a shot. Since their rate of fire is so slow, other monsters can then sneak by before the cannons can fire again. Also, cannons must be placed as close as possible to the monsters’ paths. Ideally, you want to place them where their area of fire covers a place where the monsters spend the most time. Corners tend to be good places to place cannons, since the cannons will attack the enemies the entire time they’re going around the curve. Every level of upgrade on cannon towers increases power, so upgrade them as much as you can.

Anti Air Tower
Until you can get laser towers, the anti-air tower is the absolute best defense against flying monsters. They’re fast and they have very good range. Although they don’t do much damage, they fire so quickly that the damage will add up. Unlike arrow towers, it’s definitely worth it to upgrade anti-air towers, since every upgrade increases the speed at which they fire. If that means a tower fires at a monster six times as it passes instead of only three, you’ve doubled the damage. The final upgrade is power, and as such is very useful. Unlike cannons, anti-air towers work well when grouped together.

Fire Tower
The fire tower is everyone’s favorite tower, and with good reason. They’re incredibly strong. They’re great for mowing down acorns and golems, and are even fairly effective on fast-moving spiders. They’re also an excellent way to attack bosses. But more so than many other towers, you’ve got to carefully consider where to place a fire tower. The fire comes out in a line that damages any monsters in the stream. The fire keeps coming out for a few seconds, and will continue to do damage to any monsters in the stream, but once it fires it will not change direction. This means that you’ll want to place the fire tower in such a way that its stream will hit as many monsters as possible. You should also never put fire towers right next to each other.

Upgrading fire towers is important, and it’s especially important that you get them to red as quickly as possible. The first upgrade from green to yellow increases the tower’s range, and the second upgrade from yellow to red increases the fire tower’s power, or damage. Going from red to purple increases the fire’s spread, and going from purple to black will give you extra range. Getting fire towers to the red level is critical, and the purple and black levels make it even better.

Ice Tower
Aah, the ice tower. If only Pixeljunk Monsters’s ice towers were as good as the freeze towers in Desktop Tower Defense. Alas, they are not. They don’t slow down enemies nearly as much as they should, and do close to no damage. As a result, the ice tower is easily the most useless tower in the game.

If you do use ice towers, focus on upgrading them to red as quickly as possible, since the first two upgrades increase the damage they do. The final two upgrades to purple and black only increase the spread, or area of effect.If you didn’t need to spend gems to unlock ice towers, I’d probably use them from time to time. As is, I never use them.

Laser Tower
The laser tower is at the same time one of the best towers in the game, and one of the most difficult to use well. Proper placement of laser towers is critical, because one of their greatest strengths is the ability to hit many monsters at once. Lasers have unlimited range. What? What’s that? Yes, let me say it again. Unlimited range. Laser towers will not fire until enemies come within their marked range, which is about the same as an anti-air tower. By itself, that’s good. But once it does fire, the beam continues to the end of the screen, hitting any flying monsters in its path, even if they’re all the way across the screen. So it’s critical to place the lasers in a location such that when they fire, they’re firing along a path of monsters, hitting as many as possible. If you place a laser tower poorly, it may fire across the line of monsters, hitting only one or two.

The laser tower’s first two upgrades are speed, which is good because the tower starts with a very slow rate of fire. The third upgrade to purple is range, which helps the tower fire earlier. The final upgrade is power, so it’s in your interest to fully upgrade the laser tower as quickly as possible.

Mortar Tower
At first, mortars may seem like no big deal, but in the end they’re just bigger cannons, and as such they do have a use. They’ve got great range, and the blast area of their explosions hits everything in a very large area. Upgrading a mortar is a bit of a mixed bag, as upgrading to yellow, red, or purple only increases the area of effect. But that final upgrade to black doubles the mortar’s speed, which is like having two mortars. Mortars aren’t as important as fire or laser towers, but they’re definitely useful in the right situation.

Tesla Tower
There seems to be a consensus in the online community that tesla towers are mostly useless. I’d like to disagree. In the right situation, I’ll use them in place of fire towers, and they do a good job. For example, in “Hard 1”, the level is constructed in a way that makes fire towers very difficult to use – it’s tough to place fire towers such that the flame will hit more than one monster at a time. But there are a number of places where two or three grouped tesla towers can wreak havoc when upgraded.

Tesla towers begin with a terribly short range, and usually must be upgraded to be useful. I’d suggest only upgrading them as much as you need to reach passing monsters, as every upgrade only increases range, and the fully upgraded range can sometimes be more than you need. There’s no point in spending gems so that you can reach forested areas where monsters can’t walk.

When fired, a tesla tower will attack every monster within range, which is fantastic. Not just enemies within an area like cannon or mortar towers, but every single monster it can reach. This is the power of a tesla tower. Once that range gets big enough, you can hit lots and lots of monsters at once.

Hive Tower
You can only build one hive tower on a level, but it can reach anything on the screen, including flying monsters. I’m not a big fan of the hive, primarily because it requires you to aim for it. The bees that fly out of the towers head directly for you, attacking any monsters along that path. In order to do acceptable damage, you really need to upgrade the tower fully.

The first two upgrades make the bees come out more quickly, and the second two increase damage. If you plan on using a hive, you really should upgrade it fully as quickly as you can.

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.