Defense Grid: The Awakening

Saw this on Steam. As a huge fan of Tower Defenses in Warcraft 3, I have to admit I’m at least interested. Did anyone get it, and if so, is it worth $20?

EDIT: Obligatory pictures…

THE AWAKENING

Maybe I should play it before tossing out criticism, but story in games such as tower defense always seem to forced to me. Maybe it has no attempt at putting some context to the game, or wrapping it up in a narrative. I’m just saying, it looks like it does from the (sub)title.

There isn’t really much of a story at the start, just a tutorial voice that sets the scene and a few “themes” for the maps. They all build up into an over-arching campaign though, so there might be a twist! (Maybe).

I’m really enjoying it, solid little game.

I’d like to try it, but man, no demo. $20 means I’ll wait for a demo or for the price to go down to $5.

It’s a pretty good Tower DEfense game that does a couple of things I like.

  1. There are various challenges you can play on each mission, offering replay value. One is just a harder version of the normal mission, but they borrowed heavily from DTD so there are thins like Xk challenges and X tower challenges. There is also just a “play until they take all the cores” option on at least some missions.

  2. The towers themselves are varied an interesting enough; the enemies are as well. The tower upgrade aspect is pretty nice. Nothing revolutionary, just solidly done. I definately found that a basic strategy wasn’t always applicable to every mission (other things being equal, I like to get a couple of fully upgraded meteor towers strategically placed so they can spend alot of time wailing on creeps).

The flier aspect feels a little forced to me.

  1. There is definately a puzzel aspect to many levels. But replaying never felt that frustrating. If I got hung up on a level I just went and did something else adn came back later, and was usually able to conquer it. It’s fun to get a handle on how to best make kill zones in certain levels.

F, or . will speed up creeps. You’ll definately want to do this at times.

I love Tower Defense Games. There’s no way I’m paying 20 dollars for a tower defense game without some kind of demo. There are just far too many acceptable free ones.

I got this b/c I love DTD, but never got into the one on Casual Collective.

This game is solid tower defense gameplay. It comes with a wide variety of maps and I only found one that I ended up juggling with. The only negative feedback I’ve given it is it has no start button - once you load up a map, creeps start coming in quick and some of these maps are very complicated, with multiple entry points to these platforms. I wish I had more time when first being introduced to a map. As it is, restarting is pretty painless.

The maps fall into several different types:

  1. Creep freeway - you place turrets beside the freeway
  2. Platforms with some mazing - rectangular areas connected together with small paths that you can build small mazes on the platforms
  3. Duel roadways - multiple entry / exit areas.

Some maps have elevation - so placement of turrets are critical.

You might want to check out [their forums](http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=487

) - the devs hang out & have been participating in the threads. There are also quite a few threads of people who wanted a demo, but finally caved in and their reactions are what caused me to buy the game.

Me and two other people at work bought this on the day it came out. I’ve been pretty busy, so I’ve only gotten to the 11th level. But, they’ve played non-stop and love it. Production values are high, and I’ve experienced no bugs.

I’ve never really cared much for tower defense games, but this one is really good and fun. I’d recommend it to anyone that has any interest in these types of games.

I played this at PAX and thought it was a lot of fun. I’ll definitely get it.

peacedog and Tmanpdx covered it pretty well already. I will add that it’s made by some of the developers originally responsible for the Age of Empires series, and it shows.

Excellent. Sounds good guys, I’ll look into purchasing this then (still need a credit card).

DON’T BUY THIS GAME.

Otherwise, it’ll be 4:03 am and you could have sworn it was midnight, tops.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I wish you had mentioned this earlier.

4.15 am, and then I dragged my sorry ass to work.

Beg pardon? Where do you work, “Tower Defense Quarterly”?

Been playing this for a couple of hours and it’s exactly what it says on the tin. I’ve always liked TD games, and it’s really nice to play one with good production values. A demo would certainly help sales on this, but if you’ve ever played TD in flash format you probably know if you’d enjoy a prettier version with some more tower and enemy variations.

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of support this will get once they’re done with the Xbox port. A map editor would add some real longevity.

I love tower defense games and this is a great example of that sort of game. I highly recommend it. I especially like the levels where the bad guys path around your towers so you can build mazes (as in Desktop Tower Defense).

I find this publication intriguing and wish to subscribe.

“The Tower Defender”, surely?

KG

Looks nice but not 20€ nice >.<

This is now $14.99 USD on the steam sale.

I’ve put in excess of 100 hours into this already. The 20 maps + 3-4 challenges per map add up to significant amount of gameplay. Combine this with a leaderboard for all maps/challenges, and you can OCD to your hearts content trying to get into the top 10.

What really amazes me is so little bugs. I haven’t had a single crash, it runs like a dream, even when speeding up the map. It has a nifty feature using the backspace key to go to the last auto-save (pressing it twice takes you back to the 2nd to last save point), which makes it nice since you can just go back a little bit in time, add that extra turret, and then continue playing as if you’d never made the mistake in the first place.

The graphics are excellent (for tower defense games) and has a lot of eye candy. I love seeing the aliens drop their core, stumble a few steps and then collapse, their momentum carrying them forward even after they’ve died.

Really, for $14.99, you can’t go wrong on this one. If you’ve never played a tower defense game (DTD was my favorite until this one), this is a great entry into the genre.

How much replay value is there in it? I love tower defense games, but my entire experience with them is drawn from custom maps in Warcraft 3, which are fun in large part because of the huge amount of variety you get between maps. Does Grid have good enough balance & tower diversity to stay fun after putting away a couple maps?

Also, is there co-op?