Hey pals! I’m happy to announce that Gunhouse is available now on PlayStation Mobile! We’ve got music by Disasterpeace of Fez fame, code by the guy that made Frog Fractions, and design by yours truly.

I’m here to give you some Hot Tips to excel at Gunhouse, which is a pseudo-turn-based, puzzle game/tower defense sort of hybrid. The aim of Gunhouse is to protect your precious orphans from these mechanical alien invaders, who want to eat your dang orphans. Why!? Who would do such a thing?

What you have to do in a nutshell, is make big ammo blocks within the puzzle grid inside the house. Slide smaller blocks to the left and right – you can slide as many or as few smaller blocks as you like, and use the power of gravity to fuse four similar blocks into a 2 big block! Or 2! Or if you’re a super pro, 6!

Then you have to slide blocks to the left to load the guns on the front of your house. You can also slide blocks to the right to load special attacks on the back of your house. Once the door shuts on your puzzle grid, it’s time for action. Enemies will come from the left side of the screen, and you tap your guns and special attacks to activate them, blasting your foes to bits. Once you run out of ammo, the puzzle door slides open again, and it’s time to load up more blocks – repeat until your enemies are decimated!

Now that you know the basics, onto the tips:

Tip One: Look for tetrominos.

It takes a while to get the hang of making big blocks, but if you look for Tetris styled shapes, you’re going to have an easier time. If you see a straight line on the left or right, shift the second block from the bottom one block over. That’ll make a sideways T-shape tetromino. Now shift the bottom block one over. That’ll fuse into a square! Experimenting with tactics like these will get you making big combos in no time.

Tip Two: Element match.

Right up there next to the puzzle grid you’ll see two blocks. Whichever one is closest to you is the current most powerful block type to load. The one to the left is the next one in line to be the most powerful block type. If you match these by loading a block of 2 or greater into your gun or special queue, you get a big bonus. The bigger the block, the bigger the bonus. You definitely want to make good use of this!

Tip Three: Overkill.

If you keep loading the same type of gun into the same slot, that gun will get more powerful. If you load a new type into that slot, it’ll overwrite it. Once you’ve loaded one weapon type, keep pounding at it with the same sort of block until the door closes, especially while element matching, and you’ll have a real powerful weapon.

Tip Four: Play the waiting game.

You don’t need to activate all your guns at once. If you’ve got a gun in the top slot, wait until some flying enemies appear to activate it. If you see a bunch of ground minions coming, and you have a special attack that blankets the area (like the Skull Gun special), wait until a lot of them are on screen before you activate it, so you can do maximum damage.

Tip Five: Don’t forget to upgrade!

This may seem obvious, but we’ve seen some players who forget to upgrade their weapons and health in the shop. Once you buy a new weapon, it’s auto-equipped into your random gun rotation, so make sure you power it up first. Once you get the maximum HP upgrade, you start to unlock armor upgrades, which can be pretty useful as well!

And that’s about it! With these tactics in your bag of tricks, you’ll be destroying alien jerks like a pro. We really like this game, and we hope you do too – feel free to leave us feedback or visit our website for more info about future games!

PS Vita owners can download Gunhouse from the PlayStation Mobile section of PlayStation Store for $3.29; Owners of PlayStation certified devices such as the Sony Xperia Z1S smartphone, HTC One or Sony Xperia Tablet Z, can also get it through the PlayStation Mobile Store. Click here for a full list of the certified devices or here for installation instructions.