PAX Hands-On: Defense Grid – The Awakening

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the gaming development community. I generally know who’s who and what’s in development. Despite that, I had no idea who Hidden Path Entertainment was. When I received an invitation to go up to their hotel room and try their new game, I was a mixture of intrigued and terrified. Thankfully, not only did I not get stabbed in some mysterious hotel room, but their game is actually pretty cool.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is Hidden Path’s take on the well-explored “tower defense” genre. Whether you recognize the term or not, you’ve played a tower defense game at some point. In the simplest terms, you have some “tower” or resource that needs protecting, and you strategically prevent enemy forces from capturing it. Defense Grid takes that concept and expands it into a full twenty-level “tower defense” tour de force.

In Defense Grid, you play as some sort of ancient warlord. As you progress, you “remember” how to build certain units or take advantage of certain strategies (hence the awakening portion of the title). You’ll start off with the simple units. The Cannon is your basic gun, the Laser does damage over time, and the Inferno shoots out a wave of flame over a small area. Eventually, you will open up more powerful units or defenses with new abilities. One particularly cool late-game unit is the Tesla, which has an area power like the Inferno and grows more powerful as it strikes more enemies.

As you place defenses and destroy enemies, you harvest the resources to build additional units and upgrade your existing one. Still, resources are limited and slow to build. Finding an efficient way to destroy enemies is crucial. It is not an easy challenge. Some of the levels are huge, and you need to take all routes into account if you wish to succeed. The enemies are not dumb, if you too heavily defend one path, they will find another one. The key to victory is to use certain weapon types to weaken them (a number do damage over time) and more powerful units to finish them off at a critical juncture.

Defense Grid will hit the PC through the usual digital download services this November. The storyline mode is expected to take gamers about eight hours to finish. For those who want more out of the game, there are also achievements and a series of challenge levels.

Official Website