On the other side of the fence, we have Harvest: Massive Encounter. Ostensibly, this game belongs in the real time strategy genre, in that it allows you to build your base and defenses and mine resources. However, it's very pared down, offering only five structures to build.

These structures are: the solar plant, which generates energy; the energy link, which shuttles the energy to different structures depending on demand; the harvester, which gathers 'credits' from crystals; the defense tower, which fires a laser at enemies; and the missile turret, which functions like the defense tower.

In action, there's a little bit of tower defense at play, as the goal of each mission is to build your base and mine the resources up to a particular monetary amount. Over time, more and more enemies arrive until you're either overwhelmed or have made the goal amount.

The placement of each structure is of paramount importance. You have to build in such a way that the harvesters have access to multiple crystals, and that each harvester can be fed energy by at least a couple of energy links. Similarly, the links need to be spaced so that they aren't taking the entire burden of feeding energy to one particular structure, or that they're not in the middle of a large group of links, which can cause them to overheat and lose efficiency or explode.

The defense towers have a radius within which they'll fire at enemies. They'll target one enemy at a time, and you can't direct them to target any one particular enemy. Once they've destroyed one, they'll move on to the next one. The missile turrets fire off a projectile that's more powerful than the lasers, but it takes longer to generate the missile.

The turrets can be upgraded to utilize different kinds of ordnance. There's the Tempest Turret, which fires multiple missiles and generates an electrical discharge across multiple enemies, and the Eagle Cruiser, which fires homing missiles, as opposed to the more general lob-and-explode regular missile.

You have the option to specify which kinds of enemies get targeted before others with the attack priority button, and you can also pause, slow down, or speed up the play 2x or 4x.

If you're running out of credits to build with, you can recycle buildings for half the cost of what you built them with, and this is sometimes wise to do when you've mined out an area's resources and the harvesters are idle. You can see which ones aren't doing anything by their glowing lights.

You can also, for a last, desperate attempt, set an energy link to overheat and explode, which will cause a small explosion. Enemies don't fire at you, but they'll come in and float over your buildings to destroy them.

Harvest: Massive Encounter may be limited in scope, but it's a lot of fun and very addictive. You can grab the demo right here on Big Download for both Mac and PC.