Defense Grid: The Awakening (Xbox 360)
Designing a good tower defense game doesn’t really require too much innovation. So long as the enemy strength scales well with your ability to place down and upgrade automatically firing towers to keep them at bay, it is pretty easy to satisfy what makes the genre appealing. Making a tower defense game that truly excels though requires some interesting ideas on top of that strong core design, and Defense Grid: The Awakening makes some simple changes that both change the typical approach to tower defense and improve it while doing so.
In Defense Grid: The Awakening, you play as an individual tasked with reactivating Earth’s defense grid after years of peace let it fall into disuse and ruin. Setting off to old bases, your goal is to reactivate the system while aliens are coming in to try and pilfer power cores and keep it offline so they can repeat an invasion attempt that failed many years ago because of this powerful defense grid. While the player performs their duties silently, they are joined by the digitized mind of a man named General Fletcher, a character who begins mostly as a means to explain the game and its rules to you but over time slowly begins to show a more human side. Between quips and celebrating the defeats of aliens, Fletcher begins to share stories from the past, fond reminiscing and harsh memories of the previous invasion turning him into someone you enjoy hearing from along the way. In some ways, it can almost become about protecting Fletcher just as much as it is reactivating the defense grid, for he is the artificial intelligence in charge of running its systems and the one at risk if the aliens manage to completely take down a level’s power system.
In Defense Grid: The Awakening, you can expect plenty of the tower defense genre staples present and done well. Enemies come in waves, the player having small periods to regroup after and build up for the next encounter with a bar at the top showing the upcoming enemy types. Over the course of the game more and more enemy types roll out, the game beginning with simple variations stemming from the basic alien design. There are ones with more health and ones that move faster, but soon you’ll encounter enemies with shields which require certain towers to effectively damage, flying enemies that certain towers can’t target, enemies who are only visible to towers at close range, and even enemies who are able to spread shields or stealth effects to nearby aliens. The enemies will also come in different arrangements to test you, big baddies usually on their own since they require so much firepower to take down but little ones surging in all at once and requiring towers better at dealing with multiple foes at once. No matter what kind of foe they are though, they all have the same goal, which is to reach what gives this game its edge over typical tower defense design: the power cores.
In each level of Defense Grid: The Awakening, your goal is to make sure you don’t lose all of the power cores powering that part of the defense grid, these serving as your health meter for a level. There will always be a point or two in a level where the power cores are kept, but when an enemy reaches them and manages to pilfer a few, that’s not the end of the battle. Every enemy must not only pick up a power core, but they also must carry it away, the power core not truly lost until it has left the map. This means that even if your towers couldn’t take down an enemy on its way to stealing the cores, you can still get them as they try to make their exit, the enemy dropping any they were carrying on death. After a core is dropped, it will very slowly float back to where it belongs, but any other enemy along that path can pick it up to try and relay it to the exit, meaning that enemies can gradually make more and more progress if you aren’t able to buy your cores the time they need to drift back. This system opens up many considerations for how you place your towers, the end point not necessarily needing the most protection since different areas can end up being where the power core hand offs keep happening. It also means you aren’t instantly punished for enemies getting too far, the player able to keep going even if there isn’t a single power core in its proper housing. You do earn more resources for building if you are able to keep them in their housing though, so strategies can prioritize keeping them still while others can sacrifice that small boon for a more consistently strong defense across the entire map.
The map design is also extremely important because of the energy core system, some levels giving you very few places to put towers that require delicate planning and others giving you so many spots that it’s more about figuring out the most useful positions to fill with your limited resources. Many levels also begin extremely open, the path of the aliens determined by where you place your towers to create the mazes they’ll have to walk through, although if you do block off all their paths to the energy cores they’ll just pass right through your towers so sloppy placement can end up destroying your whole strategy. Many maps you’ll encounter are best handled by viewing them at the start and planning out a mental layout for your towers to ensure the aliens have to travel massive distances to get in or out, but some levels feature multiple entrances and exits or just have the entrance and exit both be the same place. Levels where they leave through where they came in require good management of potential core relay moments, but in levels where you can’t herd them all together it will require splitting your limited resources to try and handle whichever area gets hit harder first. With the ability to speed up play, the game doesn’t really have to have any lulls in the action, but you can take the breaks between waves to try and strategize, your towers thankfully never in any danger of being destroyed but upgrades and more powerful but expensive options making it wise to sometimes tear them down yourself and adjust your plans for the harder levels.
The tower variety increases as the game goes on, but the ones available are a small bunch with clearly defined uses. The gun tower will be your bread and butter, the cheapest option being good for making mazes early in levels and dealing a little damage to anything it can detect, but the options get more specialized from there. Inferno towers spray out a flamethrower that can hit multiple targets at once, meteor towers launch their heavy payload slowly but have huge ranges and are good for filling spots other towers would be too isolated in to be useful, the temporal tower slows down anythings its pulses hit, and laser towers deal strong consistent damage to one target as long as its beam is on them. With other towers with specialties like fighting flying foes or dealing heavy damage if they have the time to charge, they all have clearly defined advantages that make for a varied arsenal with no adscititious elements. Placing complementary towers together can make for powerful choke points, and some towers might be better off near the entrance or exit based on their role in dealing with enemy aliens. Every alien killed is a few more resources to go towards building new towers, although you do have a desperation option you can use to fry enemies with an orbital satellite that unfortunately burns up the resources they would have dropped and needs to charge between uses. Your tower placement needs to consider the potential path of energy cores and not just how the enemies will get to them, the common tower defense plan of dealing hefty damage at the entrance and point of protection not always able to account for where the energy cores will be going once they’ve been abducted. Upgrades are key as well, limited space sometimes meaning that you’ll need stronger towers rather than more towers, these costing increasingly more resources as they get better but making up for it by increasing power output and effective ranges so you can build up the expected trouble areas.
Besides the plenty of creative map designs in the campaign and DLC that provides more new areas to test your tower building skill, Defense Grid: The Awakening manages to get the most out of its levels with additional ways to play them. Every level has additional challenges to complete, some just being increased difficulty options but others changing the rules around to create new experiences. Early levels where you were limited in your tower use offer ones with all towers and upgrades available, some give you only a set amount of resources at the start to build all your towers with, and others change the energy cores’ behaviors, making them poisonous for enemies to pick up or even causing them not to float back to their housing after being picked up. Besides the normal modes already pushing you to improve by rewarding effective play with medals, these modes ensure you can return to a map and experience it in a fundamentally different way, Defense Grid: The Awakening not just a good game to come back to for a tower defense fix, but also one that continues to offer up plenty of new ways to get that fix.
THE VERDICT: The energy core system at the heart of Defense Grid: The Awakening may seem a simple change to the tower defense formula, but with it, it manages to elevate the already solid design into one with much more strategic consideration and variation. Maps already demand intelligent placement of the game’s distinctly different towers to handle some capable alien threats, but the cores being able to be passed from one alien to another means that the entirety of your tower layout will see consistent use, the player needing to plan their actions well to succeed at this challenging and engaging game. Multiple challenge modes available for each map lead to further interesting alterations to the design that makes Defense Grid: The Awakening an excellent choice for a tower defense game to return to when you’re looking to scratch that genre-specific itch.
And so, I give Defense Grid: The Awakening for Xbox 360…
A GREAT rating. Even on its hardest maps and with its most challenging modes active, the power core system is such a smart design decision that it manages to balance the difficulty in a way that can lead to various survival strategies. Even with just one core still in play you can use your towers to great effect to keep it from escaping so you can squeak by with a win, but preventing it from getting to that point will often involve many small battles between different segments of your defense. You’re asked to consider more than just the entry point and the spot you’re defending, especially in stages where you are meant to make the paths the aliens will take to get to your cores. Some games will mix in player action to make tower defense more dynamic, but the power core movement system can lead to fast-paced and strategic action, the player needing to react appropriately when the cores are on the move to keep them from making it all the way out. Recontextualizing the maps in so many different ways through the challenges allows Defense Grid: The Awakening to have tons of content, but more towers or alien types to engage with would have probably elevated the base game even higher than its already impressive showing.
A tower defense game has a pretty simple level of satisfaction it can achieve just by having your placed tower layouts pay off by holding off tons of enemies, but Defense Grid: The Awakening takes things a step further with a design that less about sitting back and watching your towers work and more about constantly thinking of new ways to make your design more effective as new problems arise. Not only is it an excellent tower defense title for it, but it helps to show that even a small change to the core rules of something enjoyable, when done right, can end up making it something much more entertaining as a result.