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A long time ago, I tried the demo for Defense Grid: The Awakening. The game was right, but the price was not. I would drop 10 dollars on that easy, but 20? Nah, I said. I could wait.
The wait paid off. Soon it was on sale for 5 bucks on Steam, and I snatched it up.

There is nothing particularly unique about Defense Grid. It’s a tower defense game to its very core. There’s nothing particularly new or exciting about it. It looks nice enough. The controls, the first time you boot up the game, seem a little weird with how the camera follows your cursor around and you select things with the mouse wheel, but after you get used to it, it works really well. But it’s nothing you haven’t seen before if you’ve played a Tower Defense game. They try to make it more interesting by having this computer AI who talks to you, and who delivers a “story” of sorts, and while that’s a great idea, he’s lacking just enough personality and variety of things to say to really make him shine. Still, he’s not annoying either, so I can’t complain too much. But this attempt at making the game something other than “generic tower defense” game falls flat.

Still, this is almost the definitive version of Tower Defense. The levels in the game run the gamut of Tower Defense variants, from the one set path, to large mazing endeavors, to two streams of enemies and everything in between. The levels have a good amount of difficulty. They’re very hard to perfect, but if you just want to play through them and beat them, you shouldn’t have too much trouble, even if you’re only a casual tower defense fan like myself. I’m nearly through the “story” mode, and I’ve only gotten stuck on two levels, and I beat those on the second or third try. If you’re a fan of challenge, though, many challenge levels unlock as you beat things. There are challenges that limit the amount of towers you can build, that keep you from upgrading your towers, and many others. If you want difficulty, you can find it.
The towers themselves mostly fill standard roles. You have the tower that slows but doesn’t deal damage, the generic, cheap tower that doesn’t deal much damage but hits ground and air, a slow-firing cannon that hits both ground and air, missiles that only take down air, a flamethrower tower that hits groups up close, etc. The most unique towers, and ones I haven’t seen before, are the laser tower, the concussion tower, and the command tower. The laser tower deals constant damage to enemies that pass it on the ground, but also inflicts a DoT on them, keeping them taking damage for awhile even when they’re out of rage. The concussion tower basically sets up an area of pain. It’s constantly attacking for minimal damage and hitting every enemy in its range. The command tower is really odd, and I have no idea how you’re supposed to use it well, but basically, it increases the money you get from creatures that die in its range and reveals cloaked enemies.
Speaking of enemies, they also have a bit of variety. You actually have two damage types from your towers, ballistics and heat. Slug-throwers like guns and cannons deal ballistics damage, and are best against creatures with shields, as they take less damage from heat. Flamethrowers and lasers and the like deal heat damage, and are best against quicker enemies and so on. Resistances to different damage types is something I can’t remember seeing before. I remember seeing enemies resistant to ALL damage, but not this. It works pretty well. I soon learned my early reliance on laser towers wasn’t going to work, and I needed to mix it up.
The final piece of the puzzle is the orbital laser. You get this during the story mode, and it’s mostly what keeps the game from being balls hard at points. Basically, by holding down the L key, you fire a laser that blows up all enemies under your cursor. The laser then slowly recharges. This is basically your panic button, which you can use to take out enemies about to leave with your cores (read: lives) so you can survive long enough to figure out why they’re getting past. Enemies you destroy with the laser don’t give you money, though, and the laser recharges slow so you can’t just fire it constantly. Still, it does keep the game from being frustrating, and I appreciate it.

So yeah, this is a pretty solid piece of tower defense fun. The game has like a million Steam achievements, and has obscene stat tracking. You can look at anyone’s Steam profile who has the game and see complete stats on how many towers they built, of what types, and how many enemies they’ve killed, etc. It is completely worth the 5 bucks I paid, and probably worth 10. It’s a well-made vidjeo game. I still think it’s a hard sell at 20, though, unless you are really jonesing for some Tower Defense goodness. But when you can get Plants vs Zombies (which I’ll talk about tomorrow) for 10 dollars, it is a hard sell.