Celebrate Earth Day next week (Tuesday, April 22), with Eco-Creatures, a real-time strategy Nintendo DS game about saving the environment.

You heard right, Eco-Creatures is a RTS game.  And it has several similarities to the GameCube cult classic Pikmin.  Play as Dorian, a round, yellow, Totoro-like woodland guardian who is determined to protect the forest.  When a neighboring kingdom sends troops of robots to cut down trees, dump garbage, and pollute the river, Dorian sets out to save his home.

As a woodland guardian, Dorian can command three different types of forest spirits that look like animals.  The first troops look like squirrels and are the only ones who can plant and grow trees.  Trees are important for building new troops.  The next kind of creature in your ranks resembles  flying squirrels, and they have the power to transport items from place to place, as well as fly up and over small cliffs.  The last animal spirits at your disposal look like beavers, and they are the only ones who can swim and build bridges and slopes for the rest of your army.  All three kinds of troops can be used to fight the polluting robots.  Power up your cute battalions with Mana Drops to raise their levels and evolve them to give your troops special moves and abilities.

Move Dorian around the battlefields with the D-pad and command your little woodland troops with the stylus and touch screen.  You can tap a critter to select one, or circle a whole group to tell all of them what to do.  Then tap somewhere on the touch screen to send them off in that direction.  While this method of play control works well, the main problem is that you can only select places to go inside your field of vision.  If you want your critters to go anywhere else on the map, you have to waddle them there yourself, putting Dorian in dangerous situations. Dorian can only take a few hits before losing all his energy.  If he does, you only get sent back to base anew, but it can be a setback as it leaves your troops in dangerous situations without any sort of commands until you return to them. Luckily, Dorian will learn super magic spells throughout the game to get him out of sticky situations.

Graphics are bright and cartoony and Eco-Creatures does emit a level of polish not seen in most third party DS titles.  You can even edit your own level maps and play a simple two-player challenge online through the DS WiFi in a race to plant the most trees.  Although with so few people playing this game, chances are it’ll be hard to find a match to play against.  Basically, if you loved Pikmin, you should also enjoy Eco-Creatures.  (Unfortunately, I hated Pikmin so I didn’t enjoy Eco-Creatures much myself, but I can recognize a quality game here anyway.)

There’s actually a better “Earth Day” style game on the DS called Chibi Robo: Park Patrol.  Of course, the best way to enjoy Earth Day isn’t inside playing a video game, but instead by, you know, going outside and playing with your kids.

Kid Factor:
There’s not too many family friendly real-time strategy games out there, so if your kids have an interest in these kinds of games, than Eco-Creatures may be a good choice.  Violence is only minimal and cartoony, as your cute woodland creature only fight silly robots, and nobody really ‘dies.’  However, Eco-Creatures is still best suited for older kid gamers.  While the game starts out easy enough and does a good job explaining the play mechanics, later on the missions become more challenging and require quite a bit of micro-management and patient pre-planning.  Plus strong reading skills are needed as everything is told through text.  Families with strong religious beliefs and rules may not like that Dorian prays to trees and gods.  Even though it’s a bit preachy at times, Eco-Creatures has a good lesson behind a fairly good game, too.

Tags: Game Reviews