Sights, Sounds and Simplicity......Defense Grid: The Awakening is an elegant package.
Production-wise, the game could hardly be better. The graphics are very nice indeed. The maps have a futuristic-industrial look with nice ambient touches like drifting smoke or steam. Lighting and shading are also well done and add greatly to the overall attractiveness, and serve to bring out the detail in the structures and landscapes. The parade of highly detailed and animated aliens is certainly easy on the eyes as they lumber, walk, trot, run, sneak, glide, or fly by. Audio is first rate with convincing weapon and explosion sounds and excellent voice acting for the AI narrator and advisor. He does a swell job of selling the fairy tale style story and imparts a good measure of personality. But good looks and sound are not enough to justify the 20 dollar price tag. And given the number of free games in the genre some may wonder if the game play is enough justification. I would have to say that this game is so well done the answer is yes.
The interface and controls are elegant in simplicity and functionality. You can pan the screen with short moves of the mouse while your game cursor remains in the center of the screen. Tower selection and placement is a snap. Clicking on one of the designated sites will bring up the tower menu. A quick scroll and a click and your tower is being built. The only drawback is that when things get going you may sometimes click on a tower for building you didn't mean too and there is no way to cancel it except to sell it once construction is complete. An option to turn the cursor off would be welcome as sometimes you can no longer build anything and it would be nice to watch the action without the cursor on screen.
Game play is much like any other tower defense game but Defense Grid has a couple of added layers. First, there is the nail biting element of the cores, those 24 glowing orbs the aliens are so keen to get. So its not simply a matter of killing off aliens, you need to think of ways to keep them from getting at your cores, and if they do how to stop them from making their escape with them. This can be nerve wracking indeed in a most pleasurable way. Building and upgrading towers is not free. Defense Grid uses the RTS concept of resources. You are allocated a given amount at the start of each mission that you can use to place a few towers before the first wave arrives. After that you get more resources as you destroy aliens. You get a varying amount depending on what you kill. The pacing thus becomes important and spending wisely is key. Some of the best maps require you to use tower placement to shape the path the aliens take to and from your cores, and these are some of the most challenging and enjoyable. They are not puzzles to be taken lightly and there is considerable replay value just trying to perfect strategy for a given map. It is not always easy to consider location, ability, cost and timing when placing towers.
Another element of the strategy you will employ are the towers themselves. There are a good mix of them, all with strengths and weakness with relation to various alien types, of which there is an even greater mix. Some might argue you should be able to select individual towers and target specific aliens. This might be valid as an option, but in my opinion it would gum up the flow of the game and lend itself to excessive micro management. One consideration might be to allow general orders to be given to towers or groups of towers allowing players to prioritize targets the way they want. As it is the towers do a pretty good job at targeting. For instance they seem to prioritize aliens carrying cores or those in front of a pack instead of those behind. They also do a good job of firing between obstacles like other towers.
Once you complete the fairly brief story campaign of 20 missions you have a number of options. First you can see how many of the 57 Steam achievements you've earned. While many of them are nothing more than gimmies, (killl an alien?) some can be quite difficult and most players will be proud to have earned them. Depending on how well you did on a given map, taking into account cores lost and resources spent you may earn either a bronze, silver, or gold medal. Different medals unlock several different modes that can now be played on that map, an you can then endeavor to get gold medals in the unlocked game mode. There is "grinder" mode that pits you against 99 relentless waves of the weaker "Walker" aliens. Challenge mode is a more difficult version of standard story mode. Other modes restrict the number or types of towers you can use or varies the amount of resources at your disposal and there is a practice mode for honing strategies. This and earning medals based on efficiency and effectiveness helps keep the ball rolling once the story campaign is complete but what is really needed is a robust map editor and a multiplayer mode in which one player sets up the composition and timing of the alien waves and the other mans the defense grid to stop them. As it is now the relative brevity of the campaign is the only drawback, so those two features would ensure Defense Grid: The Awakening a place amongst the all time greatest games.