'Defense Grid - The Awakening' Review (7.5/10)

Defense Grid - The Awwakening is a very fresh take on the time consuming 'tower defense' genre. The genre itself is not very deep: you have a set starting budget, a set number of towers (or defenders, guns or whatnot) and a set number of upgrades available to the towers/defenders/guns. Income is obtained by killing the inbound creeps. Overall, a very fun game to sink a few hours into (much more if you want to hunt down achievements or leaderboard). While it lacks the outright variety that the community-made Flash counterparts have, it makes up for it with polish and eye candy.

What does set DG aside is that it's a very polished game. Sure there are bugs, sure there are aggravating interface designs, but compared to the popular alternative -- Flash based games, it's a godsend. Flash based games while fun and all, invariably suffer from three flaws:

1. Flash won't run on 64bit browsers (at least at the time of this writing).
2. Flash results in massive memory leaks over time. With 8GB of system memory, I've got quite the cushion of memory to fall back on so the leaks themselves (on the order of 100-800MB of memory -- depending on how long  I play for) don't bother me per se, but the whole experience gets outright boggy.
3. Flash input detection is horrendous. This isn't a fault of Flash per se, but rather that it simply wasn't designed to deal with pixel-perfect mouseclicks. For some reason, it also prioritizes user-input (i.e. mouseclicks) lower than users would normally expect - you see this when you're bogged down with enemies and you need to build a tower but it just won't register your mouseclick.

While Flash based tower defense games are awesome and I love them for their ability to waste time, the switch to a 'real' (i.e. application) tower defense is friggen amazing. The gameworld is rendered gorgeously (not only compared to it's Flash based brethren but on it's own). It won't win any awards for graphics or anything but for it is, it's quite pretty. It's not just that:

1. You have a fast-forward function! For those of us who build our guns at the exit and work our ways towards the entrance (or just for faster gameplay), this now means we no longer have to wait for the lumbering enemies to get to us. After awhile you find yourself playing with the 'f' key permeanently pressed.
2. Checkpoints! Every few levels (10 or so), the game makes a checkpoint so if you need to or want to, you can go back and try again (or try a different strategy). I'm not a fan of checkpoints in most games, but this - this is the perfect genre to implement checkpoints.
3. Achievements, leaderboards and stats. Sure this is more a byproduct of the integration with Steam than anything else but it's a very subtle - but ince feature. The stats and leaderboards aren't really a new thing for tower defense games - the Flash tower defense maps have had them since the beginning but the achievements, while silly, do add some value (and replayability) to the game.

It's not all smooth sailing unfortunately. I think the biggest letdown is the lack of a map-editor and/or multiplayer mode. Both are available in WarCraft III based tower defense games. Of course the WarCraft III tower defense maps lack a consistant look-and-feel that DG has and the maps, being fan-made, can suffer from playability issues too. DG has a few flaws that you notice both right away and way down the road

1. There is a medals system that awards you gold-silver-bronze depending on your score. Yet there is no score indicator present when you are playing (the score is calculated based o the number of cores present, your current cash and the total value of your towers). It's such a small thing but very aggravating when you're trying to go for a score (either for the leaderboard or to obtain the gold medal) and you can't see your score until it's over.
2. You can't zoom out anymore and you can't rotate the camera. The former is the far more aggravating -- you have to scroll around and figure out what path connects with what. The latter doesnt matter too much on most of the maps - it's really only an issue with the maps with lots and lots of elevations.

Not major grievences really, in the end, the game is a damn good fun. I don't quite think it's $20 worth of fun, but at $10 it's a nobrainer. Overall score 7.5/10.