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Before the PAX show floor even opened this lovely Friday morning, Coop and I had a meeting with Hidden Path Entertainment in which we got a chance to try out their upcoming tower defense game, Defense Grid: The Awakening. While Coop is a longtime fan of the genre, I haven’t played such a game since my days with Warcraft III, so I was curious to see if this one would be able to hold my attention.

Two demo levels were made available to us, one easy and one more difficult, which helped me ease into the game. The first level I played was pretty straightforward, with enemies coming in droves attempting to steal some energy cores and get back to the exit with them. Usually the point of a tower defense game is to keep enemies getting to a base, but in Defense Grid they need to work their way out after looting your power core, which adds another layer to the gameplay. My job was to destroy them all and finish the level with at least one core remaining, although the more you end up with, the higher your score will be. Three different types of attack towers, Inferno, Gun, and Laser, were available for varying costs, and each was also had one upgrade obtainable. The final version will have many different types of towers in addition to the ones we saw today, each with two upgrades available.

After burning, shooting, and destroying just about anything that came my way in the first demo level, I finished with most of my cores intact and moved on to the next available level feeling pretty confident—a little too confident, it turned out. The harder level completely obliterated the straight path I had seen before, instead giving the enemies many different options as far as how to get to the cores. Of course, with them trying to take the quickest path, it was up to me to block them off by building towers and rerouting them. This concept adds a whole new level of strategy to the game, which hardcore tower defense fans should appreciate. There were also more towers and upgrades in this level, but I still managed to lose all of my cores fairly quickly due to some bad planning. Next time, I’ll plan my tower placement more carefully.

Each level is also going to come with some “achievements”, which are different challenges that should help to extend the replay value of the game. The PC version is due out in November, and while the minimum system specs are not yet finalized (though they said they were shooting for 1.7ghz minimum), Hidden Path said that they want to make this game as accessible as possible, both system-wise and with the learning curve. I felt that the graphics could probably look a little more polished, but overall I liked what I saw and had fun playing this game. Hidden Path could not comment on whether or not the game would have multiplayer, but design director Mark Terrano did not write off the possibility. With a November release for PC and more details involving the Xbox 360 version coming within the next few weeks, Defense Grid: The Awakening is definitely something worth paying attention to.

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