Best Of

Defense Grid: The Awakening

I'm still here, I promise.

[spoiler]
In an attempt to make sure I failed the backlog challenge, @PirateNinja sent me this game as a gift (thanks buddy )! Not to be deterred, I attacked it wholeheartedly...

...until the laptop I was using at the time fried.

So here, I sit, almost a year and a half later, staring at @RyanFodder 's absurd Defense Grid scores. I seem to remember something about this... an ancient text from @Linc , perhaps, telling me how irritated he was that he couldn't outrank our humble @RyanFodder ? Or perhaps it was @primesuspect ? Either way, the experience of finishing a level only to find myself far behind my silent rival turned my joy to ashes in my mouth.

Except it didn't. Turns out DG is pretty darn entertaining, even if you're not going for maximum efficiency.

This is a tower defense game, a genre I am familiar with from my college days. Ah! To be back in that simple time, popping balloons with monkeys and printing out my score for all to see. So sweet, those gentle, honeyed memories. Alas, alack, etc, etc.

Turns out it actually has quite a bit more production value than the flash games I'm used to. The game is in 3D, and the models are actually rather nicely rendered... and let me tell you, nothing makes you feel more like a caviar-gobbling fatcat than a well detailed 3D model shrunk down so small that the details are almost invisible. Exquisite, Jeffrey, just lovely, you must tell me your secret!

The game appears to have a better-than-modest world behind it - you're not really sure who your companion is, but the game slowly hints at his story, the story of the planet(s?) you inhabit, the alien menace you're fighting, that sort of thing. The overall story is quite small, but isn't really hacked together (a la Call of Duty) so much as simply not told. It actually feels quite similar to the well-detailed, small models - there seems to be some very fine-grained substance about your environment, but you're so far zoomed out from it that you never get to explore it. It's a clever empire-building technique - if the fans love the product, the devs left a lot of room to flesh it out into books, games, what-have-you. And if fans won't bite? Well, they can easily imagine the world that could have been. Feels like the game isn't really ever over once you finish it.

Gameplay is plenty nice. The game walks you through the various towers as you unlock them and it's fairly clear where you can place them. There are no significantly different mechanics than in any other tower defense game, so you can focus on what matters - the satisfying crashes and kabooms that accompany cannon-fire and alien disintegration.

I'm quite glad I took a break from Lead and Gold: Running Around in the Deserted Wild West to give this a shot.
[/spoiler]

EDIT: I miss the spoiler tags.