Vital Stats

Genre: Real Time Strategy
Players: 1
Online: Leaderboards

Developer: Hidden Path
Entertainment
Publisher: Hidden Path
Entertainment
ESRB Rating: E10+
Release Date: 12/8/08

Platforms

• PC (Steam)

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a refreshingly gameplay-oriented experience. Unemcumbered by the pomp of cinematics and cut scenes, it manages to build a simple story without interrupting eight hours of harrowing tower defense gameplay, and both are better for it.

Bug Hunt
It’d be nice if once—just once—humanity could encounter an alien race not bent on our destruction, or at least that can only be defeated by diplomacy. Until that day arrives, we’ll have to be content defending ourselves with towers. At least the alien hostiles march politely through the snaking death mazes we construct.

Defense Grid sees you building towers under the guidance of a corroded mind-rip AI. You call the shots while he builds your towers at designated points on the map. After a few seconds of preparation, the aliens start marching in to steal the power cores that keep your defense grid operational. All you need for victory is to keep one power core from slipping off the screen.

This is not as simple as it sounds. Enemies come fast and in nearly limitless numbers (you’ll get the achievement for killing 10000 enemies well before finishing the game). Worse yet, imagine a grab bag of adjectives you wouldn’t want an invading army to have, like swarming, tough, shielded, fast, stealthy, and flying. It turns out that this grab bag is just off screen, and each incoming alien gets to reach in and make use of whichever 1-3 descriptors come to hand.

The good news for your survivability is that you can select from a broad range of towers that counter the grab bag-o-death. For instance, flamethrower towers may not deal the point damage you need to drop a tough enemy, but the modest spray damage adds up when you apply it to a pack of swarmers. Most of the towers have this rock-paper-scissors relationship with different alien types, though your towers will be playing 30 such games with each wave, and waves arrive every 10-30 seconds.

The strategy deepens when the aliens have more than one trait. Scissors may beat paper, but if your cutting reveals a rock, you’ll need some paper of your own to win. The breadth of your à la carte enemies makes for strategic depth that’s as challenging as it is rewarding.

The actual interface for tower building is a bit wonky in that the developers seem to have confused the mouse with the keyboard. There is a cursor in the selection menu when you build towers, but moving the mouse causes it to flick from item to item as though you’d tapped an arrow key. The resulting interface feels a bit off, and it’s altogether too easy to select the wrong tower when you’re in a rush. You can circumvent the problem by using the keyboard to make your selections, it would have been nice to be able to accomplish the same tasks comfortably with a mouse.

Enemies who cheat death long enough to snag your power cores, but not long enough to abscond, will drop them. Although your AI ally will try to pull the cores back, they return slowly, and any enemy who happens by can just pick up the loose cores where they lie. This macabre relay race really intensifies the action, because whatever resources you spend killing the offending invader aren’t closing the hole that let him through in the first place.

There are only two ways to build this level:
the hard way and the really hard way.

There’s more to Defense Grid than just lining the alien march with death from above. Several of the game’s 20 levels are fairly open spaces where you can build towers anywhere you like. Enemies and loose cores won’t pass through towers unless there’s no other way to reach their destination, so while you’re picking the right towers for whichever aliens are incoming, your success also depends on exploiting the terrain to force aliens along the longest possible path and bringing them in range of the same towers as many times as possible. It’s a fun spatial puzzle on its own, but the schadenfreude you get from hitting an alien three times with the same tower is just priceless. The downside to the pathing is that you can frequently abuse it to guide aliens away from your cores. It’s an effective trick in a pinch, but it compromises the strategy in a way that feels like cheating, and probably will devalue the game if you’re looking for a challenge.

Of course, if you’re not looking for a challenge, then Defense Grid probably isn’t for you, especially late in the game. None of the good things in life are free, and you’re awarded only a pittance of seed resources for tower building at the beginning of each battle. You can thereafter stave off attrition only with the resources you scavenge from your fallen foes. This grim economy means that surviving enemies escape not only with your power cores, but also with the resources you needed to survive the next wave. The tipping point between overwhelming success and failure is therefore annoyingly sensitive, and leads all too often to head-scratching moments where you sit in the ashes and wonder what just happened.

Mitigating the sometimes tetchy difficulty curve is the excellent checkpoint system. Every time you survive a few more waves, the game takes a snapshot of your progress and adds it to a growing stack. In addition to the usual benefit of being restored to the last checkpoint when you lose, you can also flip backward through your old checkpoints at the press of a button (so long as you haven’t quit the game). This means that you can make changes to whatever stage of your defenses you deem appropriate. The potential sting of recycled gameplay is greatly eased by a fast-forward button. Using this magic button that lets you cut to the chase is such a revelation that RTS games without it will seem uncivilized after you’ve played Defense Grid.

Believe it or not, this is a remarkably
peaceful example of the gameplay.

The price for the brilliant checkpoint system is paid by the story. The story picks up with the alien invasion already underway, and Defense Grid doesn’t waste your time or compromise its pacing by interrupting the gameplay with non-interactive cut scenes. Instead, everything you learn about the world and the alien invasion is delivered trough monologue from your AI companion while the game is underway. The problem is that this chitchat is a scripted event, so flipping back through your checkpoints means listening to the same speech over and over again. It doesn’t take long for the repetition to become tiresome, and late in the game, you’ll be restarting stages a lot.

It’s a shame too, because the story is delivered so well. The setting may be the same old tired alien invasion you’ve repelled since time immemorial, but the story is really about your brain-taped AI friend, as he tries to sort out the psychological damage of the last alien invasion from the centuries of isolation afterward and the simple decay of disused technology. Listening to him rave, forget, and recover memories is sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and always entertaining. The voice actor’s performance is that genuine kind of crazy you can only wring from melodrama.

Checkpoint loading aside, embedding the monologues in the flow of gameplay makes the story work. Blending the narrative flow into events as they happen lets each kind of story complement the other, and both the gameplay and narrative feel more whole as a consequence.

Altogether, Defense Grid is one of those games that isn’t embarrassed to be a video game, and it profits by focusing on the medium’s strengths. Unforgiving challenge and somewhat repetitious loading are a small price to pay when you can get so much good RTS gameplay and storytelling for so little money.

What It Costs: $20
On sale for $5 until 5/13

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $30 (buy)
•To The Genre Fan: $35 (buy)
•To The Casual: $10 (buy)