Eco-Creatures: Save the Forest - hands-on

But winning each battle isn't your only concern - you also have to consider planting trees along the way. At any time during battle, you can direct any of your wood spirits to start growing a tree. Tree growing takes a bit of time and your allies will be off the offensive while it grows, so you'll want to carefully allocate your resources and not grow too many at once. Since you can replay each battle as many times as you want, we found it helpful to play through a battle once, and then go through and plant as many trees as you can on the subsequent play-throughs.

Eco-Creatures is a loosely environmentally-themed game, so planting trees will of course have many positive effects. Besides dropping lots of useful items, trees can be used as healing points, increase the number of wood spirits available to summon, and can be used as summoning points, depending on the type of tree.

Overall, this super-cute RTS is still looking good, but we did have a few stylus control issues that we hope will be smoothed out for the final release.Toggling between characters seemed overly complicated at times; instead of simply selecting a unit with the stylus to issue it a command, you have to make sure the corresponding character'sicon is first selected at the bottom of the screen, which slowed us down and caused annoying errors in the heat of battle. Moving the camera around to displaydifferent parts of the battle field also gave us some problems, especially because many battles had us surrounded by enemieson all sides, with multiple mini-battles occurring across the map, and it was difficult to keep track of them all easily.

Look for our final verdict when Eco-Creatures is released in Spring of next year - let's hope it can set itself apart from the recently releasedFinal Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which showed how this genre could be done right on the DS.