Defense Grid: The Awakening

Platform: Windows, OSX, XBLA
Genre: Tower Defense
Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment

Inexplicably torn from the mighty quagmire of Tower Defense games we uncover a shining gem. Defense Grid: The Awakening. If you thought a game falling into the genre of TD could not hold a decent story, then you are wrong sir or possibly madam. Defense Grid: The Awakening is not just an excellent TD game by any and all standards, but actually contains a well rounded story worth your time. Not that the game is all story or cut scene. In fact it has no cut scenes what so ever! The game is narrated by a computer program, which; coincidentally used to be a real person. If you believe this to be an original concept then you are sorely mistaken. Shame on you! SHAME! Enough of that. Listen, I'll be the first to admit that while I absolutely love and am addicted to these TD sorts of games. I absolutely suck balls at them. This is due to the fact that I can only spend so much time going over strategy in my head before I say "Screw it! I want 'splosions!" and such and such. Graph paper is your best friend say I.

Complete with a fairly healthy supply of affordable DLC.

Behold the mighty "cores!" The more cores you have the faster you generate credits used for purchasing / upgrading your towers. You do ofcourse also generate revenue off killing enemies.

Let's talk for a moment about the enemies. As with most tower defense games the enemies come with a great variety of characteristics; be it a large swarm of enemies with low max HP or perhaps a single large enemy with a massive amount of max HP. They may have shields or they may just be immune to fire.

You will find a wide variety of game field layouts. Some easy and some quite difficult. While others can just be bat-shit insane.

The weapons are quite typical of just about any TD style game. Seriously, go play any game falling into the TD category right now and you will discover you get weapons that basically fall into roughly four different categories.

• Short Range: Usually the cheapest of all towers and the easiest to utilize.
• DoT (Damage over Time): Burning, corroding, poisoning etc...
• Defense / Support: Towers that increase range, towers that slow the enemies down, and so on and so forth.
• Long Range: Usually with a slow rate of fire, but cause heavy damage, AoE (Area of Effect) damage or some sort of specialty such as strong vs. flying enemies or what have you.

So in closing "Defense Grid: The Awakening" is indeed one of the best TD games I have played. Which is really saying something as there are a whole butt-load of them out there and they are addictive as all hell. 

Okay I'm all done here. Thanks for reading and ummm... LUke OUt!