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Review
Defense Grid: The Awakening

Last year a good friend of mine introduced me to the simple, yet addictive tower defense genre.  For those of you who do not know what this is, it’s a strategy game centered around building defensive structures against increasingly difficult onslaughts.

To be more specific, enemies “invade” your game area, either travelling from an entrance point to an exit point for the sake of evasion, or entering the field, stealing resources and then escaping.  Your goal is to stop them by building tower-based defense systems.  There are different types of tower systems, each with different ranges, rate of fire and damage.  In some cases they can be upgraded to do more damage.  The number of enemies you destroy determines the amount of credit you get to put toward building more towers.  Enemies usually vary (speed, armor, etc) from level to level.

The versions I started playing on were Flash-based games.  Graphics were (and in most cases still are) pretty basic, as is sound design.

Then along came Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Hidden Path Studios has taken an already great concept and made it even better, catapulting the 2D world of Tower Defense to 3D.

Not only are the graphics much nicer, but there is a compelling storyline behind it all.  Playing Story Mode sends you to a war-ravaged future.  A future where (of course) you are the last hope.  With a sentient computer as your guide, you slowly make your way through a number of levels that act as a tutorial for the different types of weapons in your arsenal (as well as a guide to the different types of enemies you will be facing).

Once you have finished the game in Story Mode, you can go back and replay some of the levels with added challenges to meet.

Graphics (as mentioned before) are pretty slick, due to the Gamebryo engine (as seen in Civilization IV).  Sound design is also really well done, and the music and sound effects are great.   Moving the genre into three dimensions adds complications like line-of-sight to gameplay, which makes for a more complicated but rewarding experience.

Story Mode takes a decent amount of time to finish.  The added challenges make this much, much more fun to play.  You will certainly have your share of defeats in those advanced levels before you manage to conquer this game.  Given its low price point, it’s a steal.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is currently available for the PC and is to be released for the Xbox 360 at some point.

Posted in PC, Reviews, Xbox 360 |