Defense Grid: The Awakening - Busy Gamer Rating 5

First Glance:
A mix of strategy and resource management with a dash of puzzle thrown in all wrapped up in a very good looking package.

The Short Story:
Hidden Path delivers on the promises they made at PAX. This game is addictive, fun, and easy on the eyes and ears. There’s very little here not to like. And the bonus for the Busy Gamer is that it won’t eat up your whole day.

The Score:
Having had the opportunity to sample Defense Grid: The Awakening at PAX, I was happy to see that not much about the game changed my initial impressions of it. DG:TA’s controls are easy to learn and easy to remember, long absences won’t mean having to learn everything from scratch, the graphics are very well done as is the sound. All of this and a nice low price tag ($14.99 via Steam at the moment) earns DG:TA a solid 5 on the Busy Gamer scale.
 
Body of review:
When someone mentions an RTS, you’ll more than likely hear me groan. It isn’t that I don’t like the RTS genre, just the opposite, I love it. But most of the time, an RTS has a steep learning curve and hefty time requirements to be able to succeed at, or even enjoy, it. Not so for Defense Grid: The Awakening. Hidden Path has managed to take the best parts of an RTS, mix in some puzzle aspects, and offer up a very decent title.

It’s a very simple concept. You build towers to defend your base from invading alien baddies. The towers are stationary so the twist is to try and funnel the baddies into your “killing path”. Essentially, the bad guys take the shortest clear path they can find to your energy cores (the source of your power, a factor in your resources and the bad guys’ goal) so building your towers to block access to certain points allows you to set their path. But block it to where they can’t reach it and they’ll walk right past your long line of towers to the shortest path they can find to reach the cores. Lose all of your cores and the level is over. So you want to make them hard to reach but not impossible otherwise all the hard work you’ve done setting up the perfect death maze will go to waste.

The towers are varied and have three different power levels that become accessible as you fight your way through the levels. Different towers are better in some situations than others. The Inferno tower, for instance, is great for setting fire to large groups of the smaller aliens where as it doesn’t do well in terms of range or against the bigger, tougher aliens. The Cannon tower hits much harder but can only fire on a single target at any time and the range doesn’t allow it to fire on targets that are too close. A mixture of the different towers is required and that’s where another aspect of strategy comes into play.

Resources are handled differently than other RTS games. You’ll begin a level with enough resources to build a small amount of towers at which point the only way to generate more income is for your towers to destroy some enemies. Once you’ve banked some resources, they will generate “interest” based on how many cores you have left. You’ll have to juggle between generating resources from the interest and building bigger, meaner towers to tear down the aliens more efficiently. No little miners running around in this game.

After beating a level, you have the option to move on to the next level or try again. Achieving higher scores on a level will unlock different “modes”. For instance, my score on one level unlocked a 10k resources mode where you have 10k to begin but don’t generate additional resources no matter what you do. It certainly generates a number of different ways for you to play, not to mention increasing the overall playability of the game.

While the levels can take a bit of experimenting to determine the best way to defend your base, you can spend as little as ten to fifteen minutes on a single level allowing the Busy Gamer to enjoy as short, or long, of a session as desired. And the online leader board keeps track of how well one is doing against the world at large assuring that you’ll always try just a little harder to get that high score.

This one scores high on the value charts, my friends. I would recommend picking it up if you haven’t already. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Crashers to school before they make it to my cores.

Gritskrieg – End of Line

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 4:45 am and is filed under Busy Gamer 5, Game Reviews, Gamer News, Gritskrieg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.