The Lost Town: The Dust Review

Our top DSiWare pick for the week of June 30 is a cutesy-style zombie apocalypse set in a Japanese manga artist's vision of South America. The Lost Town: The Dust casts you as Chilia, a chibi-looking, red-haired one-woman army who has to defend an isolated town full of helpless villagers from an impending invasion of the undead. It's a time-based defense game spread over the course of seven days (of accelerated in-game time) and it's up to you to keep the humans alive and uninfected until a full rescue team can arrive in one week's time.

This is a pretty slick game. I love the mix of influences that come together in it, as it's taking a bit of DSiWare's popular tower defense genre, mashing it up with the zombie onslaughts of Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D and having you control the whole thing with direct stylus input from a birds-eye perspective.

The passage of time as you're fighting off the cutesy-style corpses also reminds me of other games from the past – because you're OK to explore during daylight hours, but come nightfall (like in Castlevania II or Minecraft) the enemies turn violent and begin their true assault.

Most of the gameplay is focused on controlling Chilia, moving her around to find items, rescue lost survivors and battle foes (while gaining experience and leveling up her skills). The tower defense part comes into play around the human camp area, though, as you need to make sure its surrounding walls are always in good repair to keep zombies from shambling straight inside. You can upgrade the defenses, upgrade Chilia herself, recruit mercenaries to fight alongside you and more. It's a robust design.

The control can be a bit frustrating at times as Chilia gets hung up on impassable objects in the environment, and targeting enemies isn't always perfect. The game is also tough as heck, so gamers not trained on other defense games before this can expect to visit the Game Over screen fast and frequently.