Defense Grid: The Awakening - We've Recovered a Core

I'll be blunt, I am horrible at tower defense games. I play them online all the time, yet I can never seem to get into them. I play them and the strategy is all good, but I just don't care about the game, they are too simple, lacking good graphics and sound, and almost always in flash meaning my progress is rarely saved. They were a simple diversion, it was a strategy game to play for a few minutes at night when I had nothing else to do.

However, I recently discovered Defense Grid: The Awakening by Hidden Path Entertainment, a game that has become a saving grace of the tower defense genre for me. This game has a storyline where you are rebuilding bases with the help of a AI ally. You mission in each location is to repel a set number of waves of aliens. The aliens will move from on point on the map to a collection of power cores and then walk out of the map (sometimes the same exit, sometimes different ones). It's your job to delay them and destroy them with all your resources.

Aliens come in all types, including fast aliens, shielded ones, flying ones. They also have big, slow, strong bosses. Enemies come in swarms and walking alone, and planning ahead is going to make a huge difference in your success as certain towers are more effective against certain enemies or only effective at certain ranges.

Each scenario starts with you having a set amount of resources to build with, each time you kill an enemy you get resources and they also accumulate slowly over time. There are a large variety of towers you can build, some offensive, other's defensive. Learning what towers to use in concert is a major benefit, for example, slowing down your enemies speed in the midst of a cannon nest will greatly increase your damage dealt. Where you build you towers can also affect the path the aliens take through the level, however, you can't block the way for them, they will just walk through then. Each tower can be upgraded up to three times which will see a change stats of the tower as well as in the graphics and special effects for that tower.

Speaking of graphics and effects the presentation in Defense Grid is very good, the graphics are detailed, your AI companion has good voice acting, and the sound effects do the job well.

The game has some features to help you drive yourself to complete each level to the best of your abilities. Each level has a ranking system, each level has an online leaderboard, and each level also has special challenges like using only level one towers.

Overall, If you are a fan of strategy games in any form you will find something to like about Defense Grid: The Awakening.