Ecolis: Save The Forest

Let's jump right in here. Playing Ecolis is a bit like being an environmental campaigner. Every day, you get up and look out of the window at what a beautiful world there is. Bright, fun and full of potential. Then you get out there and notice that it's full of litter, pollution and mess. Because Ecolis, unfortunately, is horribly, horribly polluted.

The story goes like this – you're Dorian, the "cutest eco-friendly spirit in Mana Woods" – and like all adorable forest creatures you also command a secret army of rodents, ready to lay waste to any apartment-building, fish-mutating humans that might try to take over. And while there's some disparity between the idea of lovely furry squirrels and the notion of them tearing flesh from bone with military precision, it works, in a sort of strange, Saturday morning cartoon sort of way.

Each mission takes you into a section of Mana Woods, and gives you a main objective that usually has something to do with destroying everything in sight. But that's fine, because although visually each area is the same collection of green and brown, the map variation and enemy layout means that, at least on the face of it, your tactics can change.

Tactics are supposed to be provided by three types of forest spirit – Ecolis, who can grow trees, Ecomon, who can fly and carry objects to you, and Ecobys, who can bridge rivers and build slopes. The flaw here is that you generally only need to build bridges and slopes in order to move Ecolis. But because Ecomon can fly, it's much easier to ignore both bridge building and tree planting, and just raise a huge army of Ecomon to keep with you for most of the game.

In fact, some missions are made laughably easy by employing this sort of tactic. One shows you a sweeping introduction with lots of rivers, robots and a final target to destroy. But by calling fifteen of the flying spirits over from your Mana House, you can just walk to the edge of a nearby cliff, point at the final objective, and let them sort it out on their own.

These sorts of tactics unfortunately become more and more preferable as you get to know the game's AI and pathfinding. When you're on the main game screen, a quick tap of a creature will select it, and tapping on yourself or the somewhere in the world will make them follow you or move. But the little critters are only too happy to jam themselves up against a piece of scenery and sit there for the rest of the mission, leaving Dorian to defend himself with his limited selection of spells.

As if this wasn't infuriating enough, the things even have a 'personality' which changes during the course of the game. So some will sit happily and do what you tell them, while other 'mischievous' ones will run amok and seek out things to get themselves stuck in.

Stick with it, though, and you'll learn how to work around the frustration. You can slowly tame your creatures over time, for instance, by taking them out to play in the woods. And by collecting Mana Drops you can level them up, giving them new powers in between missions to use in battle. It's a very simple RPG-style trick, but by using items to level your army instead of experience in battle, it manages to put a bit of puzzling, with Dorian seeking out extra Mana in each mission to use on his troops.

It's the fact that it's such a mishmash of game types that makes it seem so fun, despite its frustrations. Sometimes you're fine-tuning your army, sometimes you're working out how to reach that last power-up, and even the battles are broken up with large-scale boss fights.

Ecolis could be a really solid little strategy game. It's got a map creator, as well as WFC support for playing online, and that symbol of DS quality, a single-cart multiplayer mode. It's got tiny squirrels and an eco-friendly moral to its story. But the problems are so fundamental to enjoyment of the game that it misses out on being a truly recommended purchase. Boss battles can be over in less than a minute if you mass your army and charge with everything you've got – the whole affair just feels too shallow to be really rewarding.

However, if you can stomach the problems, you'll be rewarded with a bright and breezy strategy game that's light, but fun. How many other games have a genetically modified soya crop as an end of chapter boss? Exactly.