misterhaan
  • Defense Grid: The Awakening

    48 hours playtime

    50 of 87 achievements

with all the dlc maps there’s really a lot here! i played the main story on all the campaigns but didn’t bother with the various challenge modes. i’m a little sad to be done with it! i won this on steamgifts and then bought a bundle that included it later, then a few years after that actually started playing it. like most tower defense there are a set number of towers and the first few levels each tend to give you a new tower type, then most of the levels after that let you have all of them. there’s the variation you’d expect in tower defense enemies and tower that work better / worse depending on enemy type. while i built mostly gun towers i found it was much more effective to work in some towers that did heat, area of affect, or air damage too.

i appreciated the companion’s voice calling out what was coming next or getting excited about towers being effective. it’s possible that made it even more satisfying to build an effective system of towers. while it sometimes frustrated me, the time it took to add or upgrade a tower made an interesting strategic element. i often found myself waiting for a gap between waves before upgrading, or upgrading towers from a group one at a time so i didn’t lose too much firepower by taking them all down to upgrade at once. eventually i started using the checkpoint feature to go back and try something different, which is a nice way to let you really optimize your design if you’re into that (i got more into that the further i got).

the biggest downsides for me were that the maps are 3d but all you can do is zoom in and out. sometimes it’s hard to tell if a tower spot is too high or low to hit the path (definitely went back to a checkpoint a couple times because a tower didn’t reach where i wanted it to). a few maps even have paths that are go underneath other parts of the map, and it would have been nice to be able to tilt the camera angle to check if anybody was there.

if you enjoy tower defense games and somehow haven’t tried defense grid you definitely should. i have defense grid 2 on my wishlist but who knows when my backlog will reach a point where it makes sense to buy it!

Vito

Tower Defense is a nice genre, which is quite rare these days. I always enjoyed it. It sounds like you enjoyed your time too. The placement issues suck though. I know those kind of problems from (mostly older) strategy games or city builders, where I encountered similar issues. At one point I gave up on Tropico 4 because of a similar issue. Came back and finished it eventually a few years later, so kudos on not letting that deter you from finishing DG right away!

i have defense grid 2 on my wishlist but who knows when my backlog will reach a point where it makes sense to buy it!

I know that feeling :D I, too, have several games I want to buy, but I want to get further in backlog cleaning first.