Defense Grid: The Awakening
Share Article I saw the game Defense Grid: The Awakening on sale the other day for around 400 Microsoft points, so I figured for $5, why not? After all, I've spent enough hours player the classic Desktop Tower Defense and other random defense tower games over at Kongregate that I figured, hey it's only $5 and having hi-def graphics on the xbox360 might make things interesting.
One of the beauties of tower defense games is their relative simplicty: There are a bunch of bad guys, usually coming in waves, that you have to prevent from getting to point x utilizing a variety of towers (if the game calls them towers. For instance, I played variety where you have mages, so while the mages function as towers, their in-game nomenclature obviously doesn't use the word tower). Though the names of towers and type and number of upgrades my change, the fundamental aspect or not letting creeps get to point x tends to remain intact as the end goal. Defense Grid holds true to this, and cranks up the graphics to look pretty on the Xbox360. I was a bit skepticaly at first at the utilizing a controller instead of a mouse, but using the right analog to move the curser and left analog to select your tower makes life simple.
A number of tower defense games basically say, "Hey, there's x entrances/exits and y difficulty. Go to town." Defense Grid eschews this complete sandbox style with a story mode, though shallow it may be. There are a number of levels, starting off with the player having just one tower. When you beat a level by preventing the creeps from taking all your cores, you move on to the next map & level. So far, each new level has a new tower for me to play with. This is a great way to get the player introduced to new towers without being overwhelmed by all the choices. If gamers prefer to jump straight into the frying pan, Defense Grid does offer some non story mode sandbox style maps that are unlocked from the beginning.
As with most games, each level & map gets progressively harder. The first few are relatively straight forward: the creeps come along a defined path and try to get all the cores (a resource you need to prevent aliens from taking for world domination) back to their exit. However, after these maps, things start to get interesting where the map is wide open, and the player must create a maze to put the creep through. By putting towers in strategic locations, the player forces the creeps to go through the maze to help maximize towers's efficiency and amount of time a creep takes to enter and exit the map- generally speaking, the longer a creep takes to move along the map, the better.
A nice feature of the game is save points. Say there's 16 waves: the game might autosave every 4 waves, allowing you to go back to waved 4, 8, or 12 if you get stuck. This can alleviate having to replay the entire level over if you die. The catch is if you don't succeed is then figuring out which wave you screwed up at. A player could potentially spend more time figuring out which wave to restart at than simply starting from scratch and utlizing a different build strategy from the beginning.
However, there are a few things I found annoying/frustrating in my gameplay:
- In the story mode, you can only unlock maps by beating the previous one, like in warcraft or starcraft. While I understand the rationale, it does get frustrating if you can't beat a map and have to try it over and over when you know exactly what's coming and there's still not a damn thing you can do about it. And it's not like RPGs where you level up in easier zones to make your current zone easier- each map is it's own beast.
- While you can speed up the game speed, I haven't seen a way to slow it down, even temperarily. Later in the game when you're trying to maze creeps or spend an influx of money, being able to slow down the game or pause to regroup would be awesome. This goes doubly so if there's a phone call or something.
- The sound & music. is kind of meh. Nothing exciting- I just play other music in the background.
Overall, Defense Grid is a quality take on the tower defense genre and for around $5 is a no brainer if you're a fan of the genre.
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