Second Earth

Imagine yourself living in a colony in a far away mining planet, and all you have to do is work to extract precious minerals from the soil. Now take that image, and mix it up with the occasional threat of imminent alien invasions and attacks and you have the full premise of Second Earth. This neat little title will provide you with a few hours worth of entertainment as you build de ultimate mining colony and allow it to survive the seemingly endless alien onslaught.

The game doesn't provide you with the option of modifying much of the graphics, but the default settings more than suffice, especially given that it is created in the Unity engine. The entire game is rendered in neat 3D graphics, and the animations and camera movements are extremely smooth. This doesn't seem to change even during a full-on alien wave where the screen eventually gets filled to the brim with tens, if not hundreds, of insectoid aliens.

As a colony, you depend on a couple of resources: power, which you get from solar panels, ore, which you receive by mining, and money, which you receive periodically from the people living in your colony. As long as you set up the base properly, all three resources charge up passively, and you can start focusing on the defensive aspect of the game. Besides the economical and social buildings, the bread and butter of the game is the defensive part. There you can choose between walls, which stall the alien advancement, and turrets which turn them into french fries in no time. While single turrets may seem to handle a handful of aliens by themselves, later waves will consist in numbers big enough to fill up the screen, so stocking up on turrets and a sturdy power supply for them is a must.

Second Earth shows great potential, at least as far as addictiveness goes, since once you get hooked by the first level, you wake up realizing that the day is over and that you've burned through all of the levels in what seemed to be just a couple of hours.