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Deforestation, pollution, global warming and industrialization -- no, not the agenda of the latest G8 meeting, but just some of the themes from Eco Creatures: Save the Forest, a unique real-time strategy (RTS) game for the Nintendo DS. We've been having a look, so here are our first thoughts.
It's a very quirky, heavily Japanese-style game with some interesting mechanics that will provide plenty of depth. The game doesn't use a typical RTS setup, where you have to select and command your units constantly. Instead of a mouse cursor or direct stylus control, you interact with the battlefield by controlling an avatar called Dorian, a big, dopey, yellow guy who's apparently modelled after the noxious durian fruit. The story goes that you're the only one who has the potential to save your lush magical forest from an evil corporation moving in on your turf, polluting left and right with its unstoppable industry. You have to amass an army of small, adorable forest creatures and take the fight straight to the bad guys to preserve your woodland paradise.
You start off with a number of basic character classes with different abilities, most of which look a lot like squirrels. These classes can then evolve as you play through the storyline to gain new powers, such as flight or dam building. Each individual unit also has its own unique personality traits, and you can engage a character-building exercise for each critter between battles to jump into a random minigame (such as a race or a dancing game) to increase that one unit's stats. You can only take three classes into a mission -- the DS has limited memory, after all -- but at least you can have 30 of each type. That's a lot of units.
Once you're in a mission, your mana house is your home base. It looks like a giant tree that's also a house, with windows and a door and such. As you gain mana from other trees you plant nearby, you'll be able to spawn more of the three unit classes you've brought to battle by tapping their wiggling tails sticking out of the mana house's branches. Once your units are loose, they'll follow Dorian around as you move him around the map, and attack based on their automatic routines when you get close to enemies. But you can also command them to do specific things, like use their special abilities, and some of these attacks can get pretty ferocious later on in the game -- we saw tornado and lightning spells in one sample level.
Eco Creatures will also ship with a surprisingly robust map editor that lets you create your own levels entirely from scratch. You can adjust terrain shape and height, add fences and barriers, change patches of ground from grass to rock, lava, or other types, and set up spawn points for enemies. Though you won't be able to trade these maps with other players, you'll at least be able to engage them in multiplayer (both local wireless and Internet) on these maps.
As the name implies, Eco Creatures is a very green game. The graphical style may be over cutesy, but it looks like there's quite a bit of depth and complexity to the gameplay, so older, tactically minded DS owners may want to give it a look as well. Eco Creatures: Save the Forest is expected to launch early 2008 on the Nintendo DS. It's published by Majesco.
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