Customer Reviews

Defense Grid

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This year indie groups seem to be the ones keeping PC gaming alive. After the brilliant World of Goo and the innovative iFLUID and CRAYON PHYSICS, DEFENSE GRID comes along and reminds me how much fun an intelligent PC game can be!

The basic idea is simple enough: you have a power supply with a limited number of cores. Aliens will try to walk (and some fly) in and out with one or more of them. Your job is to place defensive towers to kill them off before they reach the exit. The more aliens you kill the more credits to spend on towers you get. Wave after wave even more aliens will come - so you better choose wisely where to place your towers. It seems simplistic but I assure you it is not.

Different aliens require different types of defenses. From projectile and field to short and long range (and numerous upgrades), there is no short supply of defense towers. And since their deployment and upgrades are not instantaneous, you need to plan ahead (there is a tactical screen on top that foretells what kind of aliens are incoming).

As the game progresses there is more freedom in where to place your towers and, subsequently, reroute the aliens' influx. That is really fun! Make them serpentine around your more powerful towers (and delay them with the Temporal Distortion ones) to wipe them out before they even reach your power cores.

The graphics are very well done, with full zooming capabilities. The camera gets a bit jumpy when fast zooming in, a feature I particularly liked because it reminded me of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA external shots. The environments are beautifully designed with attention to detail and (contrary to full-priced releases such as SPACE SIEGE) never get boring.

I really liked this game. If you decide to bite the bullet too, be prepared to get really hooked. This is the most ADDICTIVE game ever since Civilization II!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

No DRM, can play without DVD. Also comes with the Steam version.

20 Maps

Each map has challenge modes. Their is a challenge mode called "Grinder", which is 100 waves of increasing difficult aliens ("Walkers" to be exact).

This game gets right to it, no fluff or garbage to go through. It's pure tower defense. It has a story, but it is mainly a narrator talking while you play.

I'd recommend installing the Steam version. You get leaderboards, achievements, and stats. The stats include how many Gold, Silver, or Bronze medals you won, aliens killed, tower usage statistics. The Steam version with all its perks give this game a lot more longevity, since it only has 20 maps. Despite only having 20 maps, I've played this game a lot. Over 30+ hours.

Minimum Requirements:

Supported OS: Windows XP, Vista
Processor: 1.8GHZ CPU or higher
Memory: 512 MB RAM
Hard disk space: 1GB
DirectX version: DirectX 9.0c or higher
Video: DirectX 9 video card with shader 2, ATI Radeon 9600 or newer (9600-9800, X300-X1950, HD 2400-HD 4870) NVIDIA GeForce 6100 or newer (6100-6800, 7100-7950, 8300-8800, 9600-9800, or GTX 216-280)

Recommended:

Supported OS: Windows XP, Vista
Processor: Dual core 2.0GHZ CPU or higher
Memory: 1GB RAM XP, 1.5GB RAM Vista
Hard disk space: 1GB available space
DirectX version: DirectX 9.0c or higher
Video: DirectX 9 video card with shader 3 support and 256MB VRAM such as the following, ATI Radeon X700 or newer (X700-X1950, HD 2400-HD 4870) NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or newer (7600-7950, 8300-8800, 9600-9800, or GTX 216-280)

Supports Microsoft Game Controller for Windows

I spent hours playing this game.Very fun and hard to stop playing.Excellent graphics fun to watch all the upgrades you can do to your base defenses.Pick this game up you will not be disapointed.

If you're a fan of Tower Defense games then you already know the drill, if not here's a brief run down: There's various bad guys and they're out to get to a specific point in the map (and then retreat), your job is to build towers that will thwart their progress. Towers' capabilities vary, such as they can slow enemies down, reveal stealthy bad guys, attack airborne ships and so on, and towers can also be upgraded although upgrading a tower renders it inert during the upgrade. Each time an enemy is destroyed you get rewarded and can buy newer more powerful towers or upgrade existing ones. Using strategic placement and upgrading where necessary, your goal is to survive wave after wave of increasingly more powerful baddies without running out of resources. One of the great things about a good tower defense game is that you should be able to monitor the situation fairly hands-off and take your time to plan your next attack - it's not a blast-fest where reactions are important. I love the laid-back nature of TD games, but having said that, things can often get frantic if your tower planning suddenly goes down the pan due to an unexpected group of bad guys!

Now for me it didn't get better than Desktop Tower Defense 1.5 - a free flash game available on a popular flash gaming website. The beauty of that particular game was it allowed your towers to act as barriers so you can shape the critical path as you see fit. Defense Grid adopts a similar game mechanic especially in later levels, as well as having multiple entry and exit points. The maps on Defense Grid range from tiny to massive and since it's a true 3D game it also introduces a Z-plane element allowing bad guys to go under or over your towers where the map permits, something I've not seen before in a TD game.

So all in all this is quite possibly the best TD game I've played. The multiple game modes such as wave survival, harder enemies and reverse entry and exit points add to the longevity of the game and the graphics and audio are stunning.

This game would buy you a drink... if it could!

This game is great. Many levels provide several hours of entertainment. It is a Tower Defense game that is easy to learn and challenging at the same time, well worth the money. Basically you shoot the bad guys before they can steal all the power cores. The developers took aspects of several Tower Defense games and combined them into this one.
After the first few levels the game gives you the option to upgrade the towers for more fire power for the tougher aliens. I have found the level 3 machine guns and level 2 meteor towers to be very effective against most aliens. You can zoom in to see finer detail and is especially impressive when the action is getting thick. In later levels there are more weapons and some weapons are more effective against certain aliens. Every few levels there are 1-2 more weapons and more challenging grids. I play it on my 2ghz laptop and the video card handles the action fairly well. Great game. Buy it you won't be disappointed.

This game is kind of a 4-star game since it's not deep at all and it's a bit repetitive, but the price is fantastic. And the fact that these guys are willing to sell me a game without DRM speak volumes about their love of creating fun games versus squeezing people. I don't need to have an internet connection to register or play the game, or even have the disk in the drive. And guess what ... there's no way I'm giving other people the game, I tell them it's great and they should go buy it.

But enough of that, the game isn't that repetitive, and if you love tower defenses it's addictive. The voice-over is amusing and shuts up quickly. A minor gripe is that I need to turn the volume down every time I load the game (I listen to music or watch hulu or something while I play). If these guys put out another tower defense I'd love to see tower upgrades that change the nature of the tower drastically, along with more creative towers (living towers with tentacles spring to mind).

Overall at this price if you play for a few hours a month it's well worth it, and you can trust that these guys didn't install anything on your PC that's communicating back to them which web sites you visit, etcetera.

This game is flat-out addictive. I had never even heard of Tower Defense games before I bought Defense Grid on Amazon. Now, I can't stop playing this game!

Like many other reviewers, I prefer the stages where you get to channel the aliens' path. I also love playing the Grinder option, where you have to fight off 99 waves of walkers.

My only very minor complaint is the music. I turn it off, but the next time I start the program it's back on again. Then I have to do several clicks to turn it off. A small, but slightly annoying issue.

I got this game after playing the demo. At the current price, it has been one of the best games I've purchased in years. The concept is simple: place various towers on a grid and try to kill the aliens before they steal your cores. However, the game can be complex. You have to pick the right kinds of towers to kill certain kinds of aliens. You have to know where to place towers and when to upgrade. You can shape the path of aliens on some maps. You need to place air defenses and determine when to use the superweapon (and when to save it). The game is intense, but rarely frustrating. The checkpoint save system works pretty well, and the graphics and sound are fine for this kind of game. After you finish the campaign (20 maps), you can replay individual maps with different win conditions.

The only drawbacks to the game are it's fairly short and there is no map editor. If the game had a good editor, I would have given it 5 stars. Anyhow, it gets points for coming with no DRM and being very stable.

Note: Defense Grid Gold is available as an electronic download. It is a better value than the disk version, since it has 12 additional missions. However, it comes with DRM, which requires online activation each time you install it.

Pros:
+Solid tower defense game
+Intense gameplay
+Well-crafted missions
+Decent graphics and sound effects
-Some replay value
-No DRM in disk version

Cons:
-A bit short
-No map editor

Well worth the price via Steam and DLC at only $1 makes this a no-brainer if you need to scratch a tower defense itch.

Its a really good tower defense game. Always challenging, though I do wish there were more levels. It doesn't take long for a game developer to create levels for a game of this type compared to others so I do expect more, so I do expect more in the way in quantity. regardless it was fun to play and very enjoyable.