Dylan LawrenceDefense Grid: The Awakening. Not your average defense game!
December 22nd 2008 18:31
I think I stumbled upon my first tower defense game about three years ago while screwing around on Kontraband.com. It was love at first play. I never thought such a simple premise for a game would keep me up for hours upon hours trying to make sure little beasts didn't get from point A to point B.
Just the other day, I had some extra cash in my PayPal account and was browsing around on Steam. Lo and behold, I click the "strategy" area and the first game on the list is Defense Grid: The Awakening. I was a little hesitant at first because some tower defense games are total crap and I've only actually paid for one tower defense game. I thought I'd take a chance and give it a shot.
I was blown away! A typical crappy flash tower defense game you can find at Newgrounds and such is fun for a while but has nowhere near the amount of towers and enemies as Defense Grid. I knew from the very first level I was about to lose a lot of free time. Let's take a look at some of the basics.
The Goal
The goal of Defense Grid builds on the tried and true method of "stop the enemies from leaving the map" by adding something to protect. Power cores. Your primary goal is to prevent the enemies from running off with the power cores and believe me, they WILL get a couple your first time through. The enemies take various paths on the ground and in the air and you have to strategically place your towers to take them out.
Towers
This game is all about the towers. Let's take a look at the first few towers you will be able to build.
Gun-Your standard gatling gun tower. It has a low damage output but fires quickly and is pretty cheap.
Inferno-This tower sets enemies on fire and is good for crowd control. It has a lasting effect.
Laser-This tower blasts enemies with a beam of light and keeps hurting them for a while after they pass.
Cannon-The big guns. Cannons have a long range and high damage output but have a low rate of fire.
There are a few more towers that you can unlock but I won't ruin the fun for you.
The Enemies
Defense Grid: The Awakening has a multitude of power core stealing little aliens that swarm through the map at varying levels of difficulty. There are clusters of small enemies, armored ones, shielded ones, flyers, and of course bosses. The bosses can really take a whollop so you will really have to be prepared for them but the ones that will really make you want to slam your keyboard are called "Racers". These little bastards are fast. Some bosses will spawn the Racers the whole time they are plodding along so you will have to keep a close eye on them and make sure you catch them before they grab your cores and escape.
Strategies
The whole point of any Tower Defense game is to build in your own style and hope it's effective. You can use all kinds of towers to impede and destroy the enemies so you can use any strategy you think will work. The first few maps are basic and get you familiar with the different towers and enemies but the latter levels are much more difficult. Some maps have multiple routes for the enemies to take so you will have to try to corral them into taking the path you want them to take. This isn't easy as you don't have many resources to build towers with at the beginning of the map.
You will definitely be restarting a few maps until you get the hang of them. Nothing sucks worse than having a group of towers ready to obliterate some shielded enemies and in comes a few waves of flyers. Time to start over haha.
Defense Grid is an amazing game that will keep you addicted for a very long time. There is the story mode along with a few other modes and you can earn medals and achievements along the way. This is a great incentive to keep you playing long after you have beaten each map once.
The graphics are great and the sound is just right. No repetitive beeping like some other tower defense games. All in all, I'd give this game a 10 out of 10. People might gripe that there is no multi-player option but you don't really need that in this type of game.
You can get this game from Steam and Direct2Drive if you have a PC but it will be coming to the Xbox 360 very soon.
Really Long Link is the only way to buy this game at the moment.
If you are a fellow reviewer, let me know and I can probably hook you up with a copy of the game. It's too good of a game so we need to get the word out!
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