Just a week ago Defense Grid: The Awakening released on Xbox Live Arcade and I’ve been loving it. I finally completed the main campaign but I still need to do the four expansion levels. This is in addition to the 60 challenge levels I still have to work through. If you remember my initial demo impressions I was expecting to enjoy Defense Grid. Frankly, I’m loving it even more than I thought I would from the demo.  As tower defense games go this one is not super hard like Crystal Defenders but it is still quite challenging. Getting all the way through the 20 levels takes a good 8 hour; assuming you can get through them all on the first try. Completing the levels is generally possible in a few tries, but getting a Gold (or even Silver) Medal on them is an entirely different story.  Getting a Gold Medal requires completing the level without loosing a single life as well as conserving as much money as possible. You have to build and upgrade towers at the last possible second to allow your gold to earn more interest. So, it is a constant battle of knowing when to upgrade so that no enemies escape but you don’t build the tower to early. In addition on the later levels you have to also figure out the best placement for your towers so that they are most effective.

Graphically the game looks great and the sound is nicely done too. I mentioned the camera in the demo impressions so I’ll not go into it a lot again, but I will say it looks great in HD. I’ve unlocked a good chunk of the achievements but I still need to get all gold/silver medals on the campaign missions and at least 20 of the challenges.

The demo only had a few of the towers available which is too bad because the other towers in the full game are really sweet.  There is an artillery style, Meteor tower that does massive damage over very long distances but shoots slowly.  The Cannon tower is sort of like part way between the gun and meteor towers. It does more damage than the gun tower but slower.  The really important towers for solid strategies are the Command and Temporal towers.  Neither actually shoots but they have interesting area effects.  The Command tower shows cloaked enemies and gives great gold for killed enemies in its range.  The Temporal tower slows the movement speed of the enemies in its range. By putting these together and surrounding them with fully leveled turrets essentially is a make your own choke point.  If you can get a couple of those back to back it can be really devastating to the enemy troops.

Overall I really love Defense Grid: The Awakening.  If you like tower defense games this one is really great.  It is challenging and has a ton of levels and replayability.  If you have never really tried tower defense games this is a good one to start with because it has a forgiving learning curve.   Plus the achievement have a nice range of effort required to unlock them with a few being very simple and others quite time consuming. For $10 eight hours of game play without doing any challenges is pretty good, but with all of the challenges I know I’ll be playing for weeks and maybe even months.