Eco Creatures First Look

Real-time strategy games have been sneaking their way onto the Nintendo DS for a while now--Square Enix's Heroes of Mana and Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings being two recent examples--and Majesco is working on its own RTS for the ubiquitous handheld called Eco Creatures. It's a very quirky, heavily Japanese-style game that looks to be using some interesting mechanics that will provide plenty of depth. We got a quick demo of Eco Creatures when Majesco stopped by our office recently, and attempted to absorb the game's many features in the short time we had.

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'll interact with the battlefield by controlling an avatar called Dorian, a big, dopey, yellow guy who's apparently modeled 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'll 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'll 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 an awfully green game, and we mean that in every sense of the word. It's very environmentally friendly, and it's also filled with lots of bright greens and other woodland colors. The graphical style may be awfully 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.