Aliens are invading your planet and it’s up to you to stop them! That’s the gist of this Tower Defense game, and it’s already a better story than 99% of the Tower Defense games out there. I’ll let you decide if that’s saying something or not.
If you have played a Tower Defense game before, then you can jump right into this one, the entire genre basically screams conformity. If you haven’t played one before, then it really isn’t that complicated. There is something you want to protect, and then there are lots of creatures trying to steal it from you. You build defensive structures, or Defensive Towers you could call them, that kill these creatures before they can take your precious items. The more creatures you kill, the more money you make, the more towers you can build. The genre is surprisingly addictive despite how similar each game is. There’s something about lining up the perfect defensive gauntlet so that not a single creature survives that just makes you want to do it over and over again.
In The Awakening, it is your job to protect some funky glowing balls that are called power cores. There are all the standard tower defense monsters. Fast little guys that speed by everything unless you slow them down, massive groups of cannon fodder that die to AoE damage towers, bulky monsters which are basically immune to AoE damage, and then boss monsters which are just giant, slow, and refuse to die. Thankfully The Awakening isn’t a complete repeat of the past, as they’ve thrown in some nasty new monsters as well. Imagine a Boss monster that takes forever to die, and when you kill it, two more boss monsters spawn from its guts. Yeah, they went that far.
You’re given access to a ton of towers to help you defeat all these baddie aliens, but unlike the aliens who have a lot of nice variety, many of the towers over lap on their purposes. A lot of the towers you gain access to later in the game completely trump the ones you were using earlier, and it just feels like you got an upgraded version of the same thing. Flame Towers for example, are awesome, until you get Concussive Towers, and then you wonder why you even still have the option to build a Flame Tower. It does look a lot more fun roasting the enemy with 6 fully upgraded Flame Towers, but when the aliens don’t die to that you’re kind of in trouble.
The same issue with the towers is also an issue with the aliens. What kills an alien on the third wave may not kill the exact same looking alien on the fourth wave. Aliens actually get stronger for each wave they go through, but there is zero visual representation for this. Every alien looks the same no matter how strong it is in relation to another alien of its same type.
The graphics are very nice. The particle effects on fire and the designs of the aliens and just the landscape are all very good looking. The three levels of zoom don’t ruin the experience either, you really want to sit in at the closest zoom to watch the action, but you really can’t afford to ignore the zoomed out tactical view.
The music is enjoyable for a little while, though I wouldn’t exactly call it memorable. I can’t even remember if each level had a different song or not. The sound effects are right on the mark though. Hearing your fully upgraded Cannon Tower shoot triple guns into an unsuspecting alien is wonderful.
The game does start having problems once you get past the first 10 levels though. It’s about this time that you realize most of the tower space you’re given to build towers is just there to mess you up. Even on the large maps you end up concentrating all of your attention to a tiny portion of it, creating a gauntlet of death is all good and fun, but when you’re ignoring the rest of the map it just feels like you’re missing out. Why bother even having the rest of the defense grid if all the action is going to take place within the same 5 by 10 hallway of death?
The flying aliens are a particular annoyance as well, and not due to difficulty, they’re actually the easiest alien to handle in the game. They offer some nice cash infusion, but they really feel empty when compared to the other alien types on the map. It’s because they lack any sort of interaction. All of the ground aliens come together and support each other with, if nothing else, sheer numbers. Flying aliens just make you watch the radar screen and spend money on missile towers if you see that some are going to be coming soon.
The game gets even more annoying as you progress to the “hidden” levels, the last 4 of the 20. Why these levels had special locks on them, when all the levels before them were locked in the exact same manner, just graphically different, is beyond me. These latter levels further stress the concept of the developers that there is only one right way to do things. You put your towers in this order, with these variations, in this spot on the map, and that’s how you’re going to win, anything short of that is asking for all your power cores to be stolen. Tower Defense games are supposed to be about making choices and finding different ways to a solution, not making you find the one possible solution that just barely scrapes by.
That brings up the last major issue with the game, and really the worst of them all. Your towers might fail because you placed them wrong, or they might fail because the game randomly decided that you didn’t destroy that one alien this time, when all 99 other times you would have. Hitting the backspace key returns you to a previous checkpoint, often times you will then see a wave of aliens go through your death gauntlet once more, but then each time they go through it’s a different outcome. Sometimes they die early, sometimes they die late, and sometimes they magically don’t die at all. One of the maps is literally you holding down the fast forward key and then hitting the backspace after 30 seconds after seeing that the wrong outcome occurred.
Oh right, one more complaint. Now this one isn’t unique to Defense Grid, and is more of an issue with the genre in general, as it has happened in many other games of this type. Every few seconds the game checks to see how many resources you have, and then gives you a percentage of that as interest, increasing your money pool. If you have less than 100 resources you don’t get much, but when you have in the thousands of resources, you’re getting a heft amount every few seconds. But if you spend resources on upgrading your towers then you ultimately lose out later on. Compared with the already perfectionist nature the game drives you towards with the ending levels, this is just another nail in the coffin to a game that lives in a genre of choice, but only gives you a singular solution to beat it. And don’t even try the achievement modes unless you want this perfection requirement times 50.
This is still a very good game. The length of the game is about perfect for the price I would say. $5 to buy it off of Steam, $10 on Xbox Live, if you enjoy tower defense games then go buy this one. It is a solid 10 to 15 hours of enjoyment. If you haven’t ever played a tower defense game before, then go look online for a free one and play it instead. Freearcade.com has a good number of them, and if you enjoy the genre then spend the money on this one, because it’s probably the best out there at the moment.
10% Music: 5/10 – Decent, but not memorable.
10% Sound Effects: 8/10 – Some of the sounds are excellent, but then there’s a lot of sound that is just nonexistent. That narrator gets so old.
50% Game play: 6/10 – Great the first time through. No real replay ability despite the achievement modes. Sure, you can play again, but it won’t be nearly as enjoyable. The story is also rather lackluster.
15% In the Genre: 10/10 – The best Tower Defense game in the genre.
15% Graphics: 7/10 – It’s a beautiful game for what it is, but it never makes you go wow.
Final Score: 68.5 – No idea what that means, first time I’m using this scoring method.
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