Defence Grid: The Awakening - PAX Writeup

My experience with the tower defence genre is limited to a few wasted hours with the odd flash based tower defence game, and some time with Pixeljunk Monsters, but I had a great deal of fun with Defence Grid.

This is the second release from Hidden Path, they put out Wits and Wagers on Xbox live a while back, and are now releasing this tower defence game on the PC.

I was playing the game with Mark Terrano (ex-Ensemble Studios) and Dave McCoy (ex-FASA), who were founders of Hidden Path, and they really love their games, and a really nice guys. Hidden Path are doing a bunch of things differently with this game, and it really shows.

It's the first Tower Defence game, to my (and their) knowledge that has any narrative. A Sci-Fi story, told through short cut scenes before levels and in game audio. It's being made by a relatively small team, about 20, and it's been in development for around a year.

Tower Defence games have you trying to defend a point from waves of enemies by managing gun turrets.

Typically of the genre, it's very simple to play, but complicated to master. There are 10 different types of tower, unlocking as you progress through the game, and three tiers of upgrades for each tower, each tier colour coded. There is also an interest system that means not spending money can lead to having increased resources in the future, but at the cost of reduced capability in the meantime.

There is a really clever AI pathfinding system, whereby enemies will seek out the path of least resistance in regards to the number of force fields (which are generated by two turrets positioned next to each other), but they do not consider the time they are under fire. So by intelligently placing turrets, you can massively increase the total damage they receive, adding another layer of depth to the game.

The controls are really simple, you can play it with just the mouse. The interface is pretty clever, and nicely minimalist, and there are lots of visual indicators in game giving you hints as to what is going on, the three tiers of colour coding are consistent through everything, enemy strength, turret upgrade level, core status.

It's planned for a downloadable PC release, with no distribution service planned as of yet, but I think it would be a perfect fit for consoles in the future too. Currently single player only, but there's support for leaderboards.

Overall I am pretty impressed, and it's not the type of game I would have expected to enjoy. It's lined up for a November release, and I can't wait for the final release.