For all the variety on the XBLA, the tower defense genre is sadly under-represented. The lack of titles is a bit strange, given how prevalent the games have become on the expanding iPhone App Store. Too often, you find a great game on the iPhone and wish you could enjoy it on your console at home. Defense Grid is addictive enough to make you wish you could bring it along with you on the go. The loosely told story involves a computer program that has awoken to find the aliens having returned to the planet after several decades. The witty dialogue, delivered in a sly British accent reminiscent of a less snarky version of the narrator in Fat Princess, prods you along through the game's finer points with clever quips as he untangles the cobwebs from his programming after a long hibernation. Story is probably the least important aspect of a tower defense title, but the game does well with the little bits they provide. The gameplay starts fairly standard for a tower defense game, with enemies taking a set path from the entrance to the exit.
The hook of the gameplay is the tower itself. Rather than preventing enemies from just reaching your tower, they pick up your 'power cores' from the tower and try to escape the level with them. Dropped cores start back for the tower on their own, but if an enemy runs by with a slot for it, they will pick it back up. It makes the end of the more challenging levels exhilarating, as you can spend the last couple of minutes with no cores at your tower. The game does a nice job of changing up the level maps, with some leading the enemies back the same path and others providing another exit point; forcing you to expand your line of towers. The game gets points for providing flying enemies, which travel a completely different path than the rest and do not have to circle back to the same exit as the ground-based baddies. Level design is vital to the tower defense genre, and it is one of the reasons Defense Grid shines.
A few levels in, maps begin to expand in size, with spaces for your towers through the path of the enemies. You can force their path with tower placement, adding a bit of additional strategy to the game as you attempt to make their path as long as possible. There is no way to completely halt their power core march, as dead-ends force them through the towers themselves. Defeating enemies provides resource points, to purchase new towers or make upgrades to existing ones. The solid set of towers has a nice variety of pros and cons, forcing a nice amount of strategic thinking when placing them. Inferno towers have a smaller range, and work much better against swarms of enemies than individual ones. Meteor towers have a devastating aerial attack, but cannot fire at enemies that are too close to the tower. The ability to level up each of the towers three times may seem limiting at first, but proves to be plenty as you work through the later levels.
This feature review continues on the next page, please click below to continue.
