Fresh off the Kickstarter presses we have Defense Grid 2 – the hotly anticipated follow-up to 2008’s Defense Grid: The Awakening. Developed by Hidden Path Entertainment and published by 505 Games, Defense Grid 2 is within a certain style of game that may not be favoured by the majority, but it’s certainly going to be familiar to them. Everybody has played Tower Defense before, and a great many of us have fallen in love with it, the fact that it’s another Kickstarter success story proves that. Is this validation for the ongoing adoration of the genre, or evidence of it’s stagnation?
It’s not often that a tower defense game goes as far as to have a story and, while it’s no masterwork, Defense Grid 2 does have something of a narrative to follow as you progress through the games five chapters. You, alongside a group of extremely advanced AI including the familiar General Fletcher, play as The Commander – a nameless, voiceless master of automated defense systems – in the midst of an alien invasion. The aliens, much like last time, are here for cores, but after a period of time in this new area of the galaxy, the AI generals are beginning to act strange. Sudden obsessions with moons and raspberry lollipops begin to cloud their minds. They also seem to be misusing words. It’s your job as the commander to… keep defending those cores until you get to the bottom of all of this. It’s not exactly award winning stuff, but it will give you a good chuckle now and then, and it’ll keep you from putting on music or tv in the background… at least for the first playthrough, though it matters not.
What people come to Defense Grid for is the gameplay, and Hidden Path couldn’t be more aware of that. It’s not easy to expand upon tower defense without changing it from being tower defense to something else entirely and as such, no huge changes have been made. That’s not to say the experience as a whole isn’t better than it previously has been, it is. If you can’t fix what isn’t broken then your only course of action is refinement, which is exactly what has been done here.
The aim of the game remains the same, that is to touch base at a specific location and defend the cores from ever increasing waves of aliens with a whole host of different effects. Your role in this is to place turrets in, near or obscuring their path. The variety of aliens is enough to keep you on your toes, but the variety of towers is enough to combat them in any situation. The key to this is knowing what you face and what you have to face it with. New additions to gameplay include boost towers where each tower can only be placed in specific designated locations. While you can simply place a tower on one of these locations, you also have the option to first build a boost tower that, on it’s own, has no effect but will boost – hence its name – the effect of towers place on top of it. This can including things such as damage or point boosters as well as enemy shield disruptors. These effects can be placed on a tower at any state and at a relatively low price, making for excellent aid in moments of crisis or simply just because.
Other additions include alternate AI that become available through the course of the campaign. Originally, you simply had General Fletcher, who quipped and commented along the way – making funnies or letting you know that a core had been taken, retrieved or lost, but providing little more beyond that. This time around, there are a wealth of AI from Cai to Zacara and more who each have their own distinct ability that will – on a cooldown – do such things as call in orbital lasers to decimate straggler aliens who managed to make it past your defenses; or even teleport loose cores that are dangerously close to being picked up by aliens who are likely to make it off with them under your current setup. You might even recognise a few of the voices, we interviewed one earlier this year. On top of this, though I’ve yet to figure out exactly how, is the ability to unlock certain effects for your towers. For instance, the ability to prioritize the strongest enemies or ignore enemy shields, which is a really nice way for those who have in excess of 1,000 hours on Defense Grid: The Awakening to come to a great point of personal customization as they spend the equal amount of time here.
The last addition is the modes, though they’re not exactly an addition. The first Defense Grid ultimately had a lot of game modes per mission and this one maintains many – if not all – of them while adding more. Grinder – where you face off against 100 waves of enemies; No Red Towers – where each tower cannot be fully upgraded; No Bullets – cannons or machine gun turrets (which are very popular due to their low price and middling effectiveness making them ideal for mazing), cannot be used and the player is forced to use energy based turrets in their design; and so many more. Each is available on all four difficulty settings, and in each of the modes of play be it open, competitive (where towers cannot be sold once erected) and competitive unlimited sell (where they can); which makes for a figurative ton of replayability – with both local and online multiplayer – did I mention that there’s custom level design available through the Steam Workshop?
What Defense Grid 2 does is not spectacular, it can’t be – it’s a simple premise and it’s simply executed. While it adds a hell of a lot it doesn’t break the mold in any way anyone might expect it to, but to it’s loyal fanbase it doesn’t need to do any of these things. It does what it does with such precision and perfection that it can be played for hours on end and always feel unique and challenging. It’s fantastic!
A PC review copy (via Steam) of Defense Grid 2 was provided by the 505 Games PR team.
The Verdict
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