I feel like I should do a little bit of an introduction. My name’s Michael and I’m doing my level best to pursue Charlie Brooker’s career path like Wylie E. Coyote might pursue some mad-looking but cunning blue bird. I’ll be using this vicious streak to bring you reviews and previews of games on both PS3 and PC. It’s a pleasure to be here and I hope you’ll enjoy reading my stuff; or at the very least I hope I annoy you so much that you leave loads of comments and tell your friends.
The first game I want to look at is something that I came across on Steam recently in their Festive Sale. Games are often so overthought and contrived by their very nature however there are some games from smaller developers that are creating some of the most beautifully simple but addictive games by building upon the Tower Defence genre. Even the charming cartoon-world of Popcap’s ‘Plants Vs. Zombies‘ was a subtle corruption of the genre and the games, which were the mainstay of sites like Miniclip for years, have been coming on in leaps and bounds.
However, one of my personal favourites is Hidden Path’s ‘Defense Grid: The Awakening‘ which is available on Steam for the relatively low price of £6.99 (although it was previously £1.75- but just ignore that). The basic premise of the game is that after a vicious and bloody war, “the aliens” as they’re imaginatively called are obsessed with stealing power cores that your people use to power a smug, RAF-officer-like A.I. computer. The Aliens have given up on actually shooting at you in favour of just blindly running wave after wave of infantry and armour at your defenses in the hope of smashing through long enough to take your power cores back to their base.
As long as you can see your way past the idea that these aliens have no interest in weaponry or direct confrontation with your giant, furious towers- you’ll begin to have a great deal of fun with this game. The strategising element of tower placement had myself and a friend drawing out mazes on old envelopes and really discussing the problem as if we were generals ourselves. For such a simple game it’s a hugely immersive experience but you’ll rarely find yourself wrestling with the moral quandry of blowing away thousands of unarmed aliens. You’re defending the planet, after all!
With plenty of places to plop your strategically placed towers the only concern left are the graphics are a joke then your tower defense game could be blown apart. The graphics in Defense Grid are actually incredibly impressive for a game which is technically lacking in any form of genuine artificial intelligence. At a high setting, zooming in on elements of the map reveal an impressive level of detail and you soon begin to get lost in the massive fire-fights taking place across the map. The learning curve is not particularly steep and the game eases you into the unrelenting slaughter of aliens with a few small-step missions.
As is the case with a lot of these games, the difficulty kicks up about fifty notches very quickly and you’ll no doubt spend a couple of attempts at the later missions tearing your hair out before gluing on a moustache, hiring some WRENs and creating a complicated mapping system in order to solve the problem.
The really amazing thing about Defense Grid is the variety that you feel you’re getting despite the very samey gameplay and charging, despicably thick AI. The aliens will force their way through if you block their path and you’ll find yourself using the plentiful turret placement opportunities to guide them on a merry dance of death- definitely one for the sadists and let’s face it; we’re all a bit sadistic, aren’t we?
Summary: If you fancy something to lose yourself in for a few hours, testing your abilities at strategy and defence then I’m quite sure that you’ll find few better, more addictive or cheaper games which allow you to create so much havok. The storyline is preposterous but fundamentally unimportant as the gameplay more than makes up for it.
Verdict: 8/10Available for: Windows PC & XBox 360 (Marketplace)
Windows System Requirements: 1.8 GHz Processor, 512 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0c and Shader 2 compatible video card, 1 GB HD space, Windows XP or more recent operating system
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