Defense Grid: The Awakening

 

I just played through Defense Grid: The Awakening. Out of the blue I felt like trying a tower defense game and after perusing the Steam list and doing a quick internet search this one looked like the one I would have the most fun with. There are so many tower defense games out there now but very few are strictly tower defense, usually they’re a mash of genres with stuff like resource gathering or base building and that sort of thing. Defense Grid wants nothing but to be a tower defense game and that’s what I was looking for.

The graphics have an alluring appeal to it, the towers and aliens have just the right amount of color, without becoming jarring or bleak. Music is OK, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Gameplay is very repetitive actually but in a relaxing sort of way which is a hard balance to achieve. I think the difficulty is a bit wonky though, where most of the stages (there are 20 of them) feel a little too easy and you can pretty much brute force your way to victory by spawning a huge amount of guns in the obviously right places. Then, by stage 17 or 18, the game sends wave after wave of very spongy enemies that can breeze through your defenses. The level called Waste Disposal took me about a dozen tries to get through and that’s when you begin to realize there’s very little room for error with this game. In fact your best bet is just spawning cannons, they’re relatively cheap and carry a heavy punch.

The most fun levels were the ones you get to shape the path the aliens take by placing towers in front of them in order to make a labyrinth to mow them down more effectively, but those are rather rare and far between. Most of the time the aliens are running through a predefined path and you just get to choose your weapon, usually the cannon or the meteor strike that is not that great but it has a great range, so it’s worth it. Enemy variety is minimal, but then again, you won’t be looking at them closely, it’s mostly a green crate looking thing with spiny legs attached to it. Some look like bugs and that’s about it.

I’m not sure how well I can judge Defense Grid given the only other tower defense game I’ve played is Plants VS Zombies but all in all I had a really good time with it. I know there’s a Defense Grid 2 so I guess I’ll be checking that one next.