The typical roving cursor (either a mouse, or an analogue controller) has been replaced with a cute character you control. You run around as this little defender-of-the-forests type chap, collecting money and building defensive towers along the paths to your base. You can only build towers where we have placed trees in the stages, which gave us enormous control over the design and balancing of each map. As a result PixelJunk Monsters has over 20 very different stages, all of which are unique and addictive to play.

Your monsters sometimes drop gems, which are being used to research more advanced towers, or upgrade existing ones. If you like though, you can upgrade existing towers by doing a little rain-dance-type performance in front of them too. The longer you dance, the more powerful the towers become!

The online rankings are going to be pretty competitive for this title and there are separate tables for single play, and cooperative which actually gets people to talk to each other as you play.

Every other game has flashy graphics with thousands of polygons and in-your-face transparency/effects everywhere but if every game is like that things begin to look the same; so for PixelJunk Monsters purposefully hearkens back to the pre-PlayStation era by using a ton of meticulously hand-drawn 2D art instead of 3D modeled graphics, re-creating the feel of some of those older classics.

PixelJunk Monsters will be available on PlayStation Network globally in January.