As in the first game, your goal is to save an evil tyrant from a bunch of heroes by building and maintaining an ecosystem filled with various monsters and spirits. You do this by taking control of a pickaxe and creating a dungeon full of corridors and mazes through which those heroes must pass.

As you break up the ground with your pickaxe, you will release various creatures, the first of which are slimes. As the slimes move around, they add nutrients to nearby blocks. Soon enough, different patterns will appear on the blocks as more nutrients are infused within them. These patterns indicate what type of creature will emerge if the block is destroyed. Bugs, for example, can be released from blocks that have a slight haze to them. The bugs happen to dine on slimes, so you must be careful not to produce more than you'll be able to feed. If the bugs eat enough slimes, they will start to reproduce, which can be good or bad depending on what you're trying to do. Lizards come out of blocks that have turned mostly white. They're decent fighters, so you may want to have a few around once the heroes start to appear. Unfortunately, lizards feed on bugs, so you need to produce enough of them to keep your cold-blooded friends happy. However, you must be careful not to release too many bugs, as they eat Lizard eggs, and, as indicated earlier, they can completely wipe out your slimes if they aren't put in check. As you can see, even with only three different types of monsters to worry about, having to figure out when to release what is already a challenge. Things become even more complicated when you add additional monsters and spirits to the mix.

Eventually, at least one hero will begin to seek Badman out. If you did things correctly, you will have populated the dungeon with an army that is strong enough to bring the hero or heroes down before any harm befalls the overlord. Otherwise, it's game over.

The original Picross was a nonogram logic puzzle game. In a nonogram puzzle, you are given a grid and some numbers along its outer wall. Each number tells you how many squares form a line along its particular row or column. For example, if you have a column and the numbers given are three and seven, then you know that within that column you will have two lines- one that is three boxes long and another that is seven. You must take what you know about the other columns and rows and apply logic in order to form a picture and thus solve the puzzle.

In Picross 3D, you are given a prism that is filled with cubes and, as with the original, you're to use the numbers you are given and logic to do determine which cubes must be destroyed in order to create a 3D object.

This is Renegade Kid's third FPS game for the DS following the original Dementium and Moon. The most notable changes include the fact that enemies do not respawn as they did in the first game (a major complaint about the original) and an improved save system. You also have a map at the bottom of the screen so you always know where you've been. According to some of the reviews, previous knowledge of the series isn't necessary since the story does not follow the original's and features all new characters.