Review: Defense Grid: The Awakening

Tower defense games enjoy a moderate level of popularity both in real-time strategy games as custom maps and on the Internet as Flash games. While there have been a few games borrowing from the subgenre, there have only been a few titles available on consoles that really define themselves as tower defense games - we mostly have Crystal Defenders and PixelJunk Monsters. I’ve played the iPhone version of Crystal Defenders myself and liked it, but I hear the console releases were rather shoddy ports that were a bit lacking in both the visuals and gameplay departments. But that’s where Defense Grid: The Awakening enters.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a tower defense game in which aliens are bent on human destruction and it’s up to you to stop them. The story is rather lame and uninspired, but it more than makes up for it in gameplay. You have an isometric camera view of the battlefield which is divided into a grid for orderly placement of your towers. As in all tower defense games, enemies will enter the battlefield and it’s up to you to kill them all before they leave the map. You have certain amount of money, and you use it to purchase and upgrade different types of towers. Of course, killing the enemies will provide you with more money. There are ten types of towers, each with a different ability such as your basic “Gun” turret that shoots, the “Temporal” tower that slows down enemies within its radius, and the “Meteor” tower that fires long-range fireballs that do a fair amount of damage.

As with other varied tower defense games like PixelJunk Monsters, Defense Grid‘s levels have different layouts for you to deal with, so it’s never quite the same strategy for each map. Some levels allow you to direct the path of the enemies, and others won’t let you have any sort of freedom in that at all. The enemies automatically go for the shortest route available and steal your “power cores.” Some maps feature only one entrance to the level that doubles as the exit, and others contain both one entrance and one exit. Flying enemies follow a route that you cannot change, and only a couple of towers are able to attack them.

Merely making a lot of towers won’t do the trick. As with all tower defense games, there is actual strategy involved, so you’ll have to figure out which towers to use and place and which towers to upgrade. Tower upgrades are costly, so it’s a matter of balancing your upgrades and tower purchases as well as deciding their locations. Obviously, placing the “Gun” towers everywhere will be your cheapest option, but it won’t be as effective against a series of strong enemies that will easily withstand your attacks.

You win if you manage to hold onto one power core by the end of a level, but you are rewarded with medals for beating the level under a time limit and for having more power cores at the end. The basic enemy units will be able to hold one power core, but some of the boss units are able to hold multiple cores. Every core is retrievable, however; they’ll automatically float back to their place once their captor is killed. Another enemy unit can easily pick up the power core though, so it’s not that easy.

A $10 Xbox Live Arcade title that was previously released for Windows in December of last year, Defense Grid: The Awakening seeks to be best tower defense game around. In many aspects, it succeeds in creating the most enjoyable and polished tower defense experience you’ll find on any console or handheld. The visuals are impressive in its shadows and effects, and the environments are varied and detailed enough to avoid being repetitive and completely bland. An amusing, voiced AI will leave you chuckling at least a few times during your playthrough of this game as it advises you. And for its asking price, Defense Grid includes a lot of bang for your buck; you’ll easily spend over at least twelve or so hours playing through the single-player campaign and the extra “Borderlands” levels (no multiplayer here, folks).

Like most games, Defense Grid has its share of flaws, ranging from UI issues to its lack of real difficulty. At the upper right of the screen, there is a ticker that shows the upcoming waves of enemies, but they lack detail in revealing their strength and numbers. This is coupled by the fact that enemy strength and shields are indicated by colored bars; as a level progresses, the enemies’ health and shields increase, but there is no noticeable indication of this increase. Numerical values for these items would have been a very welcome addition to practically gauge the effectiveness of your towers.

Defense Grid‘s autosave/back feature is a double-edged sword. Remember BioShock‘s Vita-Chambers and how people complained that the game was too easy? Well, Defense Grid automatically saves your progress in the levels at certain intervals and allows you to hit the Back button to revert to the previous autosave. Nearing the end of the level but found that one of your cores was taken? Hit the Back button to return to your last autosave, or multiple times to revert to previous autosaves. This is a major convenience for perfecting strategies or correcting your errors, but it also kills some of the difficulty that you might expect from a tower defense game. There is no penalty to using this feature, and when you don’t even have to utilize all your towers to cruise through the campaign, experienced gamers may think this is too easy.

Overall, Defense Grid: The Awakening is a nice value at 800 Microsoft Points. It’s a pretty title with at least ten or so hours of content that even offers corny humor from an AI with a British accent to try to amuse you. There is a lot of strategy to this game, but not as much as some tower defense or real-time strategy fans might like. It is simple yet fun, and provides a good variety of levels. Definitely recommended to newcomers of the tower defense subgenre, but tower defense veterans may want to stick to what they already play.