Get to know what Defense Grid: The Awakening is all about!

Posted by John as Shmups

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a unique spin on tower defense game play that will attract players of all skill levels.

Defense Grid is like a shooter where you never have to pull a trigger. It is more than a flash game in a lovelier packaging. It is one of the best-designed tower-defense games you can play. A whole line of upgradeable towers are available for you to choose from, complete with unique strengths and weaknesses suitable for different types of aliens trying to steal your power cores and escape with them. The shooter is just as well balanced as it is well polished in look.

Play this tower defense video game developed by Hidden Path Entertainment for Windows and Xbox Live arcade on the Xbox 360. Most tower defense games have been made as flash games with less stellar 2d graphics. Some of these really look good having a sort of interesting artistic look, but none of them have really featured a 3d engine on a same level with Xbox 360. Defense Grid: The Awakening from Hidden Path Entertainment is a graphically slick take on the genre that looks completely at home on the Xbox 360.

Game play
Begin each round with a certain amount of money/resources. You need to buy towers to protect your reservoir of energy from being grabbed by the marching aliens and taken back out the exit. Of course, this is possible with the money available at the start of the game. The strategy in the game starts with the location of your towers as well as the kind of towers and when to buy new towers or upgrade the old ones. As the game progresses and the enemies get tougher, you unlock more tower types and the ability to upgrade them. Depending on the tower type, upgrades will buy you more range, better rate of fire or the capacity to deal out more damage. You can simply pick all three. Keep in mind to carefully balance your resources, so that you can improve your “defense grid” in accordance with the increasingly difficult horde.

It is fairly easy to navigate through the game. You will encounter more aliens that have to be defeated with a certain kind of tower. The maps become increasingly complex as well, starting out with simple routes to your energy cores with plots to place turrets next to them along the way. The larger, more sprawling maps are where the placement of your towers will define the route taken by the enemies.

What makes this game an above average strategy-game is its sleek graphics along with excellent tower and alien designs plus unique challenges for the player thus exponentially increasing the amount of “replayibility”. You can play the basic story mode that takes many levels before you are using all the towers. Another mode is the story challenge that is essentially similar to the basic story mode but poses tougher enemies for you to have fun with. Other modes put a limit on the number or type of towers as well.

Defense Grid: The Awakening has nice, little touches too. Use the bumpers to move fast forward the flow of the onslaught so you don’t get bored waiting for foes to creep along. You can zoom in extra close to view the cool artistic design of the aliens. It would have been better if it could have a camera rotation feature. Watch out for that special weapon attack shown later in the game for that last-ditch desperation move when the boss is about to walk away with your energy core.

For all Xbox fans out there, Defense Grid: The Awakening is worth every cent. The shooter game is the pinnacle of design for tower-defense games not just because of its fancy Gamebryo-powered 3d graphics. The game is simply challenging and complex without altering the same rules that tower-defense games in general follow. Defense Grid: The Awakening is a great, classic game design with added depth and polish to it.

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