Defense Grid

Game-O-Meter: 7.5

Platform: Xbox Live Arcade

Date Beaten: 9/7/2009

Time to Complete: About 10 hours

Defense Grid is a tower defense game with a sci-fi theme. Unlike most tower defense games which are cutesy or for whatever reason difficult to take seriously, this game tries to take the tower defense genre in a more “mainstream” or “gamer-friendly” direction. That’s not to say that gamers don’t like cuddly ninjas or fantasy warriors, but this game ups the ante in terms of realism and special effects and somehow seems more legit or tangible because of it. Mind you, the game is not really realistic, but the developers went for a more realistic presentation, albeit sci-fi in nature.

Like all good tower defense games, this sucker is addictive and infuriating. When you beat a level and you’ve kicked tons of alien ass, you are amazed that you only got a silver medal. But the difficulty of getting golds isn’t disheartening and it doesn’t feel cheap. It’s exciting to think you could do better.

There are many ways to play and beat each of the 20-ish levels in the story mode of the game and your skills definitely improve as you play through. Even seasoned tower defense gamers will find a good challenge in this game. And if the story mode isn’t enough, there are tons of extra challenges that unlock. Replayability? Right here.

My biggest complaint with the game is that there aren’t more towers to build. In terms of towers, there’s pretty much the standard tower defense units and nothing really innovative on top of that.

The innovation comes in is through the core protection mechanic where aliens don’t just have to reach the goal of the level (your core bank), but they have to then leave the level carrying your cores. Most tower defense games just have the enemies moving through the environment to the end. In this game, destroying aliens carrying cores toward the exit becomes a priority. Often, the aliens enter and exit in the same place, which is totally awesome because the aliens need to come back through your already fortified areas. But here’s the catch: if an alien drops a core, another alien can pick it up before the core (slowly) returns back to the bank. If you smoke an enemy right near the exit and there are new enemies coming in, one of the new enemies might just grab the core right near the exit and bail. This type of core juggling gameplay is a fantastic addition to the genre.

Also, there’s a massive satellite laser you can use a couple times per level that introduces a “Hand of God” mechanic which is cool.

On top of all of that, the flying enemies don’t follow the same path as the ground units and when they grab a core, it’s unrecoverable even if you shoot them down. So the flying enemies are scarier than the normals.

All in all, this is a really fun game. I definitely recommend it to fans of the genre. It’s not the best I’ve played within the genre, but it’s definitely hangin’ out at the pub on a Saturday night with the best.

Continue rocking on. Over and out.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Beaten Games, Games. 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.