PixelJunk Monsters 2

PixelJunk Monsters 2 is straightforward enough to be enjoyed by casual gamers, but trying to perfect it on the highest difficulty will provide a worthwhile challenge to the hardcore gamers.

After waiting all these years, it’s absolutely wonderful to see PixelJunk Monsters back once more, but the more I played it, I couldn’t help but feel a looming sense of disappointment at the lack of content and new ideas. It’s a game I hoped to love but walked away only liking, and that’s a shame for what is a follow up to my favorite tower defense game of all time.

A true and very solid sequel to the roughly ten year old tower defense action.

PixelJunk Monsters 2 is exceedingly similar to its predecessor. The core mechanics remain simple with deep, nuanced strategy, but the short length and lack of multiplayer innovations are a letdown. It’s an easy game to recommend for fans and newcomers to the tower defense genre, but it lacks the impact of the original.

PixelJunk Monsters 1 was a great tower defense game, and its sequel is exactly that. The claymation layer is impressive, but the game is haunted by a clumsy camera and limitations in co-op.

Pixeljunk Monsters 2 does the original great justice by lifting the core experience and spreading it across a big, bright, three-dimensional playing field. But it feels like a typical tower defense game from the 2007-08 boom. It fails to incorporate ideas from genre contemporaries who have moved the mark as far as agency.

It's an okay-at-best tower defense title that treads familiar ground. Coming off the original, that's a huge downgrade.

Having played Monsters 1 to excess with each iteration released and on each platform it was released on, I was ecstatic to learn of the Monsters 2 launch! The original was a near perfect game and the absolute best couch co-op experience on this planet. Monsters 2 brings all of that back - ALL of it - and then some. Visually stunning, I love the design - are these the dead Tomorrow People assets? The controls are tight, multiplayer dancing is rewarding, and the challenge remains on each curvy road. Outstanding release from Pixeljunk, well done. Now to earn all these rainbows...

Disappointing couch co op compared to predecessor. This game is extremely janky when playing in 2p mode. We loved the first monsters and were hyped to see it available again on PS4. The multiplayer aspect feels like a cheap afterthought. It even gets stuck in 1st person mode while playing 2 player with no way to change back. The camera angles do not help navigating the map. It's sad because there are too few couch co-op games anymore.

For this update to the original Pixeljunk Monsters, Q-Games have ditched the Pixel Art style, and gone for a true 3D "claymation" style. It looks incredible, but unfortunately interferes with the gameplay to the extent that veteran fans may be disappointed. The first disappointment is the lack of levels: there are five areas, each with 3 levels. The levels can be played in "fun" or "tricky" mode (reminding me of Lemmings), but there's actually not a massive difference between these difficulties. So essentially, you're only getting 15 levels before you've seen everything the game has to offer. In terms of visual design flaws, there is no way to view the entire playfield. In the original PS3 game, you had a fixed perspective of the who area; in subsequent versions (such as Pixeljunk Monsters Ultimate on PS Vita), you could toggle between this and a slightly closer view. PixelJunk Monsters 2 has two views... a top-down view similar to the original, but which follows your Tikiman about and an almost "over-the-shoulder" 3rd person view. The top-down view doesn't let you see the entire map at once, which means a lot more wandering around to figure out what's going on. The 3d person mode looks adorable, but serves no useful purpose whatsoever... except perhaps to spot things that are hidden from view in the top-down mode (more of which, later). It's not terribly pleasant to remain in the view for long, however, as there's an extreme depth-of-field effect in play, and the camera is far closer to Tikiman than you'd probably like. The lack of a completely "zoomed-out" mode is baffling, as it is as essential as it was in the original game: sometimes you need to see everything you've arranged, in order to figure out the best strategy going forward. The towers upgrade in a similar way to the original game, but the towers start with no flags at all, and then go through a different colour scheme (dirty yellow, dark green, blue and dark red). The flags also display the level number on them, but it's often hard to see the flags in top-down view, due to the towers being rendered in 3D. Your tower faces the nearest path, and the flag is on the right hand side of the tower... so if your tower is facing left, the flag is hidden behind the tower. This is one of the two possible use cases of the 3rd person view. Speaking of things that are hidden... you will frequently miss coins and gems dropped by the various monsters you annihilate. They can often drop behind trees or the raised bits of earth the trees sit on. There is a visual indicator to show that you've missed something, but you need to walk away until the item is offscreen to activate this. Once you're near the item, the indicator moves away, so whether you find the coin/gem is largely down to luck. Or, you could switch to the 3rd person view... the second reason it's there. Another minor annoyance is the permanent "vignette" effect around the screen, in all modes. It makes the 3rd person view particularly claustrophobic. It would be nice to determine when it does and doesn't appear. With all of the above criticisms, you're probably going to conclude that I hate this game, but I really don't. I'm simply disappointed that it's not as fun to play as the original, which I played on PS3, PS Vita and PC extensively. In fact, the original Pixeljunk Monsters is in my top 5 video games of all time, and I've been playing these things since the late 70s. I honestly think everything I've mentioned above could be remedied in a future update, in a way that would not upset anyone currently 100% happy with the game. I've noticed many online reviews bringing up the same points in their analyses, so hopefully Q-Games will sit up and take notice.

The art and mood are fantastic, but from a game design perspective PJM2 does not live up to its prdecessor. Moving around is extremely frustrating, level design appears random, and there is no info what upgrades or towers do. The joy of strategy is gone.

I can't play the game because of the freezing issues on PS4 Pro. I sent so many crash reports via PSN but still game is not playable. That explains my 0 point really well.