Defense Grid: The Awakening
Verdict: loved every minute of it
In a Nutshell: Defense Grid: The Awakening is a 3-d tower defense game that feels a lot like Starcraft.
“Defense Grid: The Awakening is a unique spin on tower defense gameplay that will appeal to players of all skill levels. A horde of enemies is invading, and it’s up to the player to stop them by strategically building fortification towers around their base. Beautiful environments, spectacular effects, and a dynamic, engaging soundtrack bring the world to life. The controls are intuitive and the gameplay is deep — the special attacks and properties of each tower work together to provide many ways to succeed.”
- Fun Rating: Really Fun
- ESRB: n/a
- Players/Mode: single-player / campaign
- Game Duration: 20 hours for the story (but according to the site there are only 8 hours to the storyline?! I must be terrible at tower defense!)
- System: PC
- Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment
- Website: http://defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/
- Cost: $19.95 at Steam, Greenhouse, or Direct2Drive
- Demo: available at several locations
| Would I play this again? | yes |
| Would I recommend this game? | yes, if you like tower defense |
| Was the story good? | not really a story here |
| Was the music good? | yes |
| Were the graphics good? | beautiful |
| Was this game difficult? | yes |
| Was this game frustrating? | no |
| Was this game offensive? | no |
| Was this game worth your time/money? | yes |
Playing the game
In this game, aliens have returned to steal the power cores for some nefarious purpose. You must build towers to destroy the aliens before they can grab the cores and leave the area. To help, the game provides you with encyclopedias of the various towers and aliens so you can plan which towers to build to maximize the damage.
The currency used in this game is resources and you start each level with some small amount. Building towers costs resources; destroying aliens gives you more resources in which to build towers. A level is completed successfully if you have at least one core remaining on the map when the last wave of aliens has passed through.
What the game gets right
Finally, a tower defense game with a reason to destroy everything coming through the map (other than that being the point of tower defense). The fear of losing something that belongs to you that you need to defend lest the enemy take it makes the consequences of poor strategy much more palpable. In this case it was aliens after power cores, but this addition could be varied to germs on the way to infect a populous, or cops coming to “snatch my crops”.
There is a LOT of game to be had here. Even if you’re not a big achievements toiler, there is, in addition to the standard story mode, one or multiple challenge modes for each level (which I still need to try).
This game is going to give me an ocular cavity with all of the eye candy. The animations and art are top notch, the interface is slick and intuitive. The zoom feature is a chewy center of sweetness not only for the helpfulness on the multilevel maps but also for the ability to watch, up-close, as the invaders reap the consequences of daring to challenge the might of a tower god! (OK, that was probably over the top.)
What the game gets wrong
Nothing comes to mind other than the “misleading” ESRB warning about online content during the game’s title screen. Because of that little notice, I kept hoping to find the co-op (team up to defend the cores) or versus (defend your cores and redirect the enemy towards your opponent’s cores) buttons so that I could play with/against one of my friends on steam. Alas, it was not to be.
Saving from any point in the game would have been nice due to the time it took to get through some of the more advanced maps. There are auto-saved checkpoints along the way so not all of your planning will be lost if you have to stop before you finish a level.
Sum it up
I did have a bit of a problem with lag in the game running on a laptop so make sure you’ve got the minimum requirements.
Part of me (the lazy part) wishes the game had a pause button for those of us that aren’t so great at planning under pressure. If not a pause button, maybe with the encyclopedias of towers and aliens there could be an unlockable encyclopedia of the game’s maps to study? I guess there is always the pictures of the maps on the game’s site so maybe the second one is just really lazy.
Apparently I like tower defense games since I’ve enjoyed the time spent on the three that I’ve played. Do other tower defense games have the same premise as Defense Grid (you have things that someone else is trying to take)? I’ve got to say that this one is the most fun of the three. What do you think of it?
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