Game Review: Defense Grid (PC)

**skynes** · March 3rd, 2009, 15:33

Platform: PC, XBLA (2009)
Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Ratings:

PEGI: Not yet rated

ESRB:

Defense Grid is a tower defense game. A tower defense game is a form of real time strategy, but instead of building bases and armies all you build are a series of turrets and gun ports who will shoot at anything that comes in range. The goal is to protect your main base from any and all invaders. Every kill your turrets make gives you resources that you can spend buying new turrets or upgrading existing ones. Each turret and enemy have different effects and abilities that must be taken into account when planning your defense.

The tower defense genre is normally found in flash form or on Warcraft 3 custom map sites. This make Defense Grid one of the few retail defense games. The quality difference is noticeable immediately, Defense Grid makes use of full 3d models, large maps, multiple zoom levels for the camera and beautiful graphics for the areas. Furthermore your AI assistant who also serves as your tutorial teacher has excellent voice acting.

The story of Defense Grid is that you are the last line of defense against an invading alien force who seek to steal the power cores of your bases. Assisting you is the uploaded mind of the previous commander who fought the aliens 1000 years ago with little success. The game follows a linear progression path of 20 levels, each level consists of a series of waves, during and in between which you must build and upgrade your line of defense, aiming to secure and guard as many power cores as you can. Some of these levels have a linear path, with your turrets being built to the sides of the path, other levels allow you to build turrets to block off entrances and pathways forcing the aliens to take the route that you choose. Should you block them off totally to the cores, they will instead walk through the force fields surrounding your turrets taking the shortest route they can.

A staple of the defense genre is the variety of turrets and enemies, each having their own abilities and effects. Defense Grid is no exception to this and has a wide variety of weapons at your disposal. Some of the common turrets such as anti-air missiles and slow down are available, as well as unusual turrets such as stealth detection, long range meteor storm and even a satellite cannon can be used to protect your cores.

The replayability of Defense Grid is very high. Each level has multiple 'advanced modes' such as harder enemies, fixed starting cash with no resource gain from kills, a limited number of turrets or the grinder mode. Grinder mode has 99 waves of average strength enemies who are constantly on the march, each wave contains more and more enemies that seek to overwhelm you with numbers. Each of these modes has their own worldwide high score table, comparing your score with every other player.

Excellent voice acting for your assistant, a wide variety of enemies and turrets, multiple levels, multiple difficulties, achievements, beautiful graphics for the levels and high replayability make this an absolute must buy for anyone who loves the Tower Defense genre, or even for those who enjoy strategy games. At the very least trying out the demo should be a priority.

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Seems I can't get copies of the images from Games Press without their watermarks.

Any ideas?