The patch will be releasing VERY soon, with Japan getting the first patch release on October 23. If all goes well with final testing, you will see the patch in SCEA and SCEE territories on October 30.

The Q-Games team has been hard at work on the PixelJunk Monsters patch and has packed a TON of great features into this great game. Here's a quick breakdown of some of the new features you will expect to see:

PixelJunk Monsters Patch:

• Game Difficulty settings: You can now choose between three different difficulties of gameplay! There is a Casual mode, the Regular/Ranked mode, and Hard-core mode. The great news here is that you can use any combination of difficulties to complete your progress through the islands! Is there one particular map that’s too hard? Try it in Casual mode. If you Rainbow the level, that rainbow counts and will remain on the map no matter what difficulty the other rainbows were achieved at! Only the Regular difficulty will register on the ranking boards, though.
• Tower Menu selection: You can now set the default menu to appear when selecting a tower! How many times have you sold off a tower and run over to another tower to quickly upgrade it and accidentally sell it by mistake? I know I’ve done that many, many times. Now you can choose which option appears as the default, instead of the last action you selected.
• Tower Balancing: Those of you who have purchased Encore know about the reduced cost on the Ice Tower, and balanced functionality of the Tesla tower. This patch applies those changes to BOTH islands, not just the Encore island.
• Video Recording / YouTube Support: Ever since Q-Games included this feature into PixelJunk Eden, we knew it needed to be in Monsters as well. You will be able to record up to 10 minutes of gameplay and upload it directly to your YouTube account, or send it to your video folder on your PS3’s XMB.
• XMB Custom Soundtrack Support: You can now make your own custom soundtrack to listen to as you play PixelJunk Monsters and Encore! I’ve personally been enjoying listening to the PixelJunk Eden soundtrack while I play Monsters, as well as listening to the PixelJunk Monsters soundtrack within Eden! It’s great how well those fantastic soundtracks work in other games.
• TROPHIES: Trophies are now added for both PixelJunk Monsters and Encore. We weren’t able to retroactively apply Trophies to the previously played data, but Q-Games didn’t want to force people to play everything all over again. They came up with a great idea by creating Trophy Challenges. These challenges have specific maps with set rules or objectives that will reward you with Trophies if you complete them properly.

With these features being added, and several other small bugs being fixed in the game, you’ll have a great time playing PixelJunk Monsters and Encore all over again.

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.

Features :

• 1 new island, Toki Island
• 15 new levels
• 5 new music tracks from Otograph
• Ice Tower is now a stock item
• Reduced gem cost to buy the Tesla Tower

PixelJunk Monsters Encore is currently available worldwide