Defense Grid: The Awakening Review [360]

11 Sep 2009 at 11:11:05 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360, PC)

Defense Grid is one of the best tower defence games I've ever played, which is a terrible, terrible thing.

Tower defence games are new to the genre spotlight. Much as there have been tower defence maps for games since, ooh, maybe Starcraft, there hasn't been much in the way of stand-alone tower defence releases until now. All of a sudden there are things like Desktop Tower Defence on PC, Lock's Quest on the Nintendo DS, PixelJunk Monsters for PlayStation 3, and – yes –  the utterly splendiferous Defense Grid: The Awakening, which is so enjoyable I'm making up new words to describe it.

Generally speaking, tower defence games ask you to defend a location by constructing a variety of towers to kill the waves of enemies coming towards you. Variety comes through particular mechanics – some ask you to direct the enemy route by blocking off paths with towers, while others have a pre-defined route and ask you to cleverly place towers along the sides of the route in order to maximize damage. Types of towers and enemies also vary; you might have groups of weak enemies, slow but strong enemies, flying enemies which ignore towers. To counter them, you'll have ludicrously powerful towers that only hit air, towers that fire slowly but do obscene damage, towers that have a very long range but fire slowly, towers that hit an area but are very weak, towers that do minimal damage but slow enemies down... Perhaps the game in question – like Defense Grid - lets you upgrade the towers, too, helping you make the most of minimal space and any choke points that you've either created or that are on the level. One way or another, thinking carefully is the means to survival.

So why is a tower defence game being great a bad thing? It's simple: tower defence games are, and I'm sure I can make up some science that supports this, the mathematical epitome of “just one more go” gaming. A full round of a good tower defence game will likely take less than fifteen minutes, it will have a variety of different strategic options available at any one time, and it will be hard enough that on success you'll know you can do better, and on failure you'll know you can beat it next time. As such, being one of the best tower defence games I've ever played makes it nothing short of an absolute bloody time sink.

Defense Grid: The Awakening gets everything right and has plenty of stylistic choices that raise it above its nearest competitors, including graphics that manage to convey all the information you need while simultaneously being gorgeous. The game itself is divided into 20-odd levels, which mix between open maps – those in which you create a route for your foes – and constrained levels, which ask you to place towers along the route. Your enemies are a race of invading aliens which originally struck 1,000 years ago, and your assistant is the guy who fought them off back then. Knowing that the aliens would return, his mind was uploaded into a computer back then, and now that they're back, he dishes out advice as you desperately try to bring the defence grid (see? The title makes sense!) back online. Not all is well with him, though, and his tales of what went on in the past are both touching and compelling, not least because of superb voice acting.

The aliens are trying to steal your precious, precious power cores, which power the defense grid. They come into the area, move to take the power cores – you begin with 15 – and then attempt to leave. Killing aliens grants you resources, which can be used to construct more towers or to upgrade existing ones, and therein lies the rub: you might have the perfect tower setup in mind for any given level, but you're not going to have the resources to create it off the bat, and trying to survive while you put it together is no easy task. As more and more towers and upgrades become available and more enemy types start appearing, the complexity gradually increases.

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