Not that it really needed
that much reinvigoration, and not that the game does anything
that special other than making TD finally look like something other than a shitty flash game (which, to be fair,
Vector TD,
Ultimate Defense, and some others have at least tried to do
conceptually, whatever the end result may have been).
So what's the idea?
Defense Grid: The Awakening, released from Hidden Path Entertainment, is an attempt to make a really shiny, pretty, nice-sounding and gunfire-filled TD game. As much as I like TD games (there are
a metric crapton to choose from already, after all), it does get a little tiresome with the tiny fucking flash screens you can't maximize that hurt your eyes and make you want to punch your monitor after 20 minutes. I was realizing this while playing
GemCraft last night. So I decided to spring for
Defense Grid, despite the fact that it's priced at a rather ridiculous $20 and only includes 20 levels.
Basically... well, it's Tower Defense, except it looks and sounds awesome, has aliens and giant robots, and an interesting little character who narrates bits of the story mode and throws a few (thankfully infrequent and unintrusive) comments on the gameplay. Things are helped a bit by the addition of Steam achievements (however much these can sometimes piss me off, they do make sense in games of this type) and medals you can earn for performing well in the individual maps. Then there are harder versions you can play after beating them normally, presumably with their own medals to earn.
So I don't know how to feel about it. It doesn't seem worth the money when there are so many decent TD games out there already that are completely free, a lot of them with more content, but the fact that it's so big and pretty and doesn't constantly make you squint is awfully nice. The whole system itself is fairly robust, if not deviating too much from the standard norms. You've got about 15 enemy types, some of which are just stronger versions of others [EDIT - Wrongo. Looking at my Steam stats, it looks like there are actually 15 different unique enemy types], and a bunch of towers you can build/upgrade/remove placed at various areas around the maps, each which are useful for getting rid of a particular brand of baddie or serving some utility function (or which are less powerful but are generally useful for killing everything). There are a couple unique things it does, like having stealth enemies that are invisible and can make other enemies invisible unless you have a certain tower type to see them, and an orbital cannon you can fire that wipes out dudes in a one-time blast o' fun, but overall it sticks to the general formulas.
It does look good, however. It's very pretty, and the environments are really nice to zoom around in. That's definitely a big part of the appeal they were going for, and it works.
So if you're a big TD fan, you might want to give it a whirl. It doesn't seem like a terrible value overall for a game, at least if you enjoy trying to milk the best scores out of levels, just... less compelling when there are so many TD games that do virtually the same thing for free. But it's popular, and it would certainly be worth checking out if you buy it on sale at some point.
It's a Steam game, and you'll be using Steam whether you pick it up from the service itself (obviously) or Direct2Drive (though I *think* you can actually play it without the client if you're willing to forgo leaderboards and stuff), or you can get it from
Greenhouse, which uses their own libraries - which I'm totally unfamiliar with and thus can't tell you shit about them - for leaderboards and stuff.
