The first game just won our award for one of the best PSP games of the year. And now a demo just came out for its sequel.

So I gave it a try… and it seems like it’s gonna be a lot better than the first!

Read and see what I liked about it! (just a short post)

What stays the same?
The basic gameplay doesn’t change. You build a dungeon by destroying blocks. Destroying blocks with nutrients in them create creatures. You get different creatures depending on the amount of nutrients in the block you break. Using slimes, the basic super-weak creature, you can move nutrients around in the dungeon. Other creatures eat lower level creatures. So in the end you have to maintain a working ecosystem while making sure to have powerful monsters to defend the Overlord from heroes coming to kidnap him. The basic gameplay works as well as before.

What’s new? (in the demo)
There’s some additions to the gameplay. The most noticeable is extra things on display. There’s some extra bits of info on the screen, both when zoomed in and zoomed out. For example, you have a better view of where the Overlord and the Heroes are in the dungeon since they’re circled when you’re zoomed out, and you always see a meter at the bottom giving a rough estimation of the division between the number of creatures you have.

The biggest gameplay addition is evolution. Depending on how your monsters die in your dungeon, the remaining monsters of that species might evolve to fit the current situation. If they get eaten a lot, they become a smaller stronger form. If a lot of them die because they don’t have enough food, they’ll evolve into giant form which doesn’t require as much food to survive. If they mostly die because Heroes kill them, they stay in basic form. As in the first game, you can upgrade your creatures, and upgraded creatures get their own evolutions as well. The Almanac will definitely take a lot more time to fill up this time.

I’ve seen that Fungus can grow in the dungeon too. It acts as food for most creatures, nutrients for slimes to transport around, and if you kill if nutrients spread all around it. There’s probably more than one version of that.

Another addition is the fact that the game isn’t confined to one dungeon anymore (well, 2 if you count the second difficulty level). Instead, you have to conquer multiple continents, each which seem to include 1 dungeon for you to defend the Overlord in. There’s also a new mode, which is not available in the demo. Overall it kinda loses that “arcade-style” gameplay from the first, but it gains a more coherent story as a result.

Overall
The sequel seems like it will have a lot more depth than the first game. In addition to the few changes I mentionned here, there are things like water which wasn’t seen in the demo, and maybe some more stuff. Needless to say that this sequel adds a lot to the original’s concept. This is definitely one to look out for.

On another note, buying the UMD nets you the first game as a bonus. The UMD is $30, and the PSN release is $20.

jobocan Games, Handheld, demo, impressions, psp