Defense Grid The Awakening: Nothing a beam of coherent light can't solve!

 

Dedicated tower defence game Defense Grid: The Awakening provides consistent and free downloadable content, marking it a highly replayable title.
 

For those unfamiliar, tower defence games task the player to defend a set position, in this case, an energy “core” storage area, from waves of flying and land-based attackers. The goal is to place defensive towers at strategic locations in an attempt to destroy all the incoming waves, with each kill earning the player points to purchase more towers. 

Defense Grid provides many options for the player to accomplish this. The game’s 11 different towers range from those that spit fire to those that spill bullets and other nasty projectiles. Some towers deploy a slowing field, others provide a point multiplier. There are towers cheap enough to construct “mazes” with, and towers that cost an arm and limb. Each tower can also be upgraded twice for better effect.

In some levels, attacking aliens will travel along preset unchangeable paths—leading to some quirky and rather large level designs. Other levels leave the path making to the player’s hands, allowing the creation of elaborate kill zones. Most levels have flying and land based enemies, each with different resistances, making some guns more effective than others in different situations.

Since Defense Grid’s release in fourth quarter 2008, developers Hidden Path Entertainment released three additional DLC packages: Resurgence, Borderlands and C.H.A.S., the latter two free of charge.

Resurgence comes with eight maps, about the same difficulty as the late-game maps in vanilla Defense Grid. Borderlands comes with four maps, but these are much harder to beat—the aliens are stronger, there’s less room to manoeuvre, more “core” locations to lose, among other challenges. The third DLC C.H.A.S. pays homage to Valve’s Portal, and consists of two maps. Of particular interest is a map designed to mimic a Portal level. C.H.A.S. is just as much of a challenge as Borderlands.

The base game comes with 20 maps, providing about 15 to 20 hours of gameplay for one playthrough. There is also a practice mode and a whopping eight challenge modes for every map to add replayability. These include the 10 tower limit, 10k resource challenge, reversed alien spawn points, a single “core” challenge and a challenge that limits the player’s ability to upgrade towers.