Coming back around for more? Alright then...
Tower defence games thus far have been simpler affairs, notably in the graphics department. I don't remember all the tower defence games the 1001 list has put in front of us, but the majority have been Flash-based lunchtime entertainment, not detailed 3D polygon models of animated alien invaders stealing chunks of our blummin' core, as is shown in Defense Grid: The Awakening.
Is a considerable bump in graphics enough to get me to pay more attention to the genre, or does the idea of tower defence just turn me off at its first utterance?
Fun Times
Defense Grid: The Awakening has been sat in my Steam library for a while now, untouched as those around it got installed, played, and uninstalled. Its name not only didn't inspire me to check it out but didn't give me any sense what the game was about. It is only after learning that it is a tower defence game that the first part makes any sense, but what of the second? What is awakening?
The mission selection screen hints that the time has come to dust off an old terminal, where we find the uploaded intelligence of a former tower defence engineer or some such fella.
His lengthy slumber has left him a tad bit loopy, but he soon shakes off the cobwebs as you work your way through the early stages of what is, essentially, a basic tower defence game. Aliens will walk, run, and fly along a set route through the level, ending at your core. En route, you will build various turrets with infinite ammo and automatic target acquisition to defend your core from these aliens.
So far, so tower defence.
The twist on the formula here is that once an alien has nabbed a segment or two of your core, it'll trundle all the way back through your defence grid. Only once all of your core has been consumed by aliens that have beaten your defences twice will you lose a level.
This means your defences will need to have a little more planning go into them, as packing all the damage-dealing defences at the start of the run means they won't be used again until an alien is a minute away from its goal. If it hasn't taken a lot of damage on the first run-through, will it take enough on the return journey to keep your cores intact?
So you spread out your defences along the entire route, and new stages introduce new weapons for you to play with, each with their own effective ranges, price points and favoured enemy. You'll want a mix to cover yourself as best you can, but can only put new defences into play once you've killed enough aliens and farmed them for the resources needed to build a new tower. No, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but you've got to have a currency system in these games somehow.
Aliens come in all shapes and sizes, each with their own annoying properties. This lumbering beast was nice and slow, but it tanked absolutely everything I had in its way, nabbed some cores and got a fair way back through the path as well.
Any cores that are dropped will slowly travel back to the core on their own, along the path, but I've seen other aliens pick them up and turn right around to run off with them, so you've got to keep an eye on where your cores are at any given point, luckily an easy task, as they glow bright blue and the HUD constantly tells you the status of your cores, including how many you've lost and are currently losing.
Having played a couple of levels already and finding that even with the ability to fast forward time, I was hoping for a level to just end, I opted to play the next mission with the Fully Loaded variant: every type of tower unlocked and ready to go.
There are cannon, tesla coils, some kind of meteor launcher, even a device that creates pockets of space where time is slowed down, allowing you to shoot your targets that much longer. There is, put simply, a lot of possibilities to play with here.
Final Word
I'd played close to an hour of Defense Grid: The Awakening at that point, and that was enough for me to come away with a few things.
Firstly, it's a rather good tower defence game. It looks nice, runs well, allows you to zoom into the action to check out all the details. There aren't many details, but you can get close and personal to these foes of yours if you want.
The number of missions seems quite sizeable, with community-made (or else community-inspired) content and mission tweaks available from the very beginning to spice things up. No need to make progress through stuff you don't want to, by the looks of it. It's all unlocked and waiting for you to dive right in.
But it is a tower defence game, and eventually, you get to the point where you've seen enough, or at least I do. I was having a good time, yes, but I wasn't having an amazing time. I was interested in seeing all the cool new towers in that last level, sure, but I wasn't in the mood to retry the level to see them in action properly, nor was I urging myself to make progress to work them into the story naturally.
How do you make a story from a tower defence game anyway? None of these levels connect, none of it makes sense. It's just the barest of fluff to keep you invested. They've tried to get a humourous AI in there, but to be honest, the graphics and the presentation as a whole did a better job of getting me interested than the voicework ever did.
Enough to get me to play again? Never say never, I suppose, but I rarely find myself desperate to play a tower defence game. They just don't scratch any itches I find myself having. Defense Grid: The Awakening is, however, a definite contender for one of the best, and probably the one I would pick above the others I've seen so far.
It's definitely worth checking out, but sticking with? Probably not for me, no.
Fun Facts
If you happen to be a fan of both tower defence titles and Portal, there's a GLaDOS-themed set of levels and challenges available for download just for you.
Defense Grid: The Awakening, developed by Hidden Path Entertainment, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2008.