Desert Moon is an impressive tower defense Time Waster

If you look at the type of time wasters I normally cover, you'll mostly find physics games, a platformer here and there, and maybe a puzzle or two.

One genre I almost never cover is tower defense games. I guess I normally don't enjoy them all that much – it's purely subjective. But this is one thing that makes Desert Moon all the more remarkable: It's a tower defense game, but I actually had fun playing it.

You're commanding a troop of soldiers stranded on an alien planet for five days. Each day, multiple waves of incoming beasts are going to run at you, and try to get past your defenses. Your job is to place your soldiers before each wave so that their fire pattern (and weapons) effectively cover the surface, and keep the beasts from getting past them.

Once a beast touches one of your soldiers, the soldier dies and there's a gap in your defenses. When enough beasts manage to make it through, you die. Later on in the game, beasts don't have to touch the soldiers – they explode when they're near enough, so you need to start using longer-range weapons to keep the beasts away.

There are six different types of weapons, as well as four types of power-ups you can use during each wave. It's Flash, but it still took a couple of minutes to load on my DSL connection. This is one game you may find yourself spending quite some time with.

Tags: desert moon, DesertMoon, flash, fun, game, time waster, time-waster, time-wasters, TimeWaster, tower defense, TowerDefense, web