What is it
Defense Grid is a tower defense game. What makes it better than all the free browser based ones? A lot . I'd never played a tower defense game before this, and I love it. So yeah. You build (invincible) towers to destroy the incoming waves of enemies. The enemy's goal is to walk along the path to your power cores, pick them up, and leave the level again. You have to stop them. The game is very well balanced, has many tower types, each of which can be upgraded a few times, looks very nice graphically, and has heaps and heaps of depth. You gain resources for each kill and this can either be spent on more towers, spent upgrading the ones you have or just left to accumulate interest at a faster rate. I'll post some screenshots but they won't look very impressive. Even videos are boring and give off a "what's this meant to be?" vibe. It's one of those games you need to play. It also has online leaderboards for everything, lots of challenge modes, and Steam achievements and stat tracking.
Reviews and such
I had a long ramble paragraph about how I discovered the game, but i decided people would just lose interest and leave the thread so I moved it to the bottom and instead here's shiny review scores and awards yay :p. First there was an IGN review and they gave it a respectable 8/10, and also listed it in its "Top 10 games you may have overlooked" list. PC Gamer gave it 90/100 and an editors choice award. And, well, the list goes on..
Eventually they brought out a Steam demo (hooray). http://store.steampowered.com/app/18510/
It's a small download so I recommend everyone gives it a go . You'll be playing in 5 minutes. The first few levels are just to get you used to how the game works and there's not really any strategy involved. It's just 'build towers to win'. But then the last demo level is where you get a taster of what the game is really about. You have a lot of freedom, need thinking to win and its very satisfying making a long path of destruction for the aliens. NOTE: The F key speeds up the game. For some reason the demo doesn't tell you this until a few levels in. It's essential because otherwise its very slow
How I found it
I saw it appear on Steam at the end of last year and didn't pay much attention to it. After all, a lot of indie games aren't really worth your money you know? But then I was linked to a thread on the Steam forums where the dev was having a small competition to give out a bunch of free copies of the game (which i'd never seen before there). So that got me interested. The dev there is great. He's always posting on the forum. Helping people out, reading suggestions, jsut general talking. There was no demo so I couldn't try it, but a few people on my friends list just kept playing, so I kept an eye on it. So then the demo came out and I was hooked almost straight away. I had exams though so I had to put off buying it. But as soon as they were finished the game went onto my Steam account. At the time of writing its the most played game on my account at 26 hours in the paat 2 weeks (woah). 2nd and 3rd are TF2 at 11 and L4D at 8.
Anyway a few screenies. They only really show the basic levels, so i'll post one at the end of a much more complex and free one but i'll just provide a link because it'll obviously be a spoiler.
And here's 2map overviews from the website showing 2 later levels. I'm tempted to show the last level but I won't.
Ooh shiny ice level
Maze. Make them take the longest route usingn your towers!
So yeah. Gogogo get the demo . I let my little brother play my Steam copy and he loves it, and I told my big brother (who is hard to impress these days) to try the demo one day when he was bored and he loves it too. So i wanted to come here to raise awareness.
LINKS
Official Website - Has developer diaries, blog posts with technical aspects to towers and how to use them well. It also has forums but they're not very active. Most people just post on the Steam Forums.
Steam store page
Steam Forums Defense Grid section - Thought it was worth posting this as well because it shows that people are happy with their purchase, enjoy talking about the game and giving suggestions, and it also shows dev involvement. Pretty active for an indie game like this that not many people know of.
tl;dr version
Great indie game, loads of replay value, dedicated friendly Dev team (currently working on an XBLA version). Try the demo!
Last edited by Spidery_Yoda (2009-02-09 10:00:22)
