DG2: Defense Grid 2

Defense Grid 2 is a tower defence game where waves of aliens spawn in and go to your power source. They take a power core, then head to the exit. Sometimes the exit is the entrance, but other times there is a dedicated exit. Some maps even have multiple entrances, so essentially you may be fighting two different battles. The aliens never attack your towers; they are only concerned with stealing your power cores. You lose if all your power cores are taken. When aliens are defeated, the power cores slowly return to the source.

You can place towers down where there is a slot for them, and there is usually plenty of slots. On some maps, you may only cover 30% of it. This gives you plenty of decisions to make to get the most efficient use out of them.

Some missions have a set path, and you can place towers to the side of the path. Others have a set of plazas which are square areas, and you end up placing towers in a maze structure to slow the aliens down and do the most damage. There must be a path leading from their entrance all the way to your power source; you must give the aliens a fair chance of winning!

There are many towers to place, with many of them being introduced over the course of the first chapter. Each tower has a few attributes; attack power, range, attack speed, and may be better suited against certain alien species, or against individuals, or groups of them.

If you place a boost block, your towers can have additional upgrades. You have a choice of 3; 25% extra attack, the ability to uncover invisible aliens and remove shields, or to boost your score if aliens are defeated in its vicinity. The shield removing ability was very beneficial. The boost block can also be placed to be a cheap wall.

The game starts off easy enough, I was just placing a tower everywhere I could. Later on, you need to make sure you upgrade the towers because the basic ones just don't cut it. You also need to make sure you have a few Missile towers, because these are extremely strong. In fact, I think they are way too overpowered, and they seemed far too cheap given how they perform in contrast to other towers.

Your commander has a special ability such as a focussed missile strike or to slow down multiple enemies. This ability has a recharge time, so can be used multiple times within the same mission.

If your friends have played the game, you see their score in real time, allowing you to benchmark your progress. There are bronze, silver and gold medals to achieve in each mission, although I found the targets scores to be very close together. I also found I often ended up doubling the amount of points I had in the last 5 mins. So it looked like I was way off target, then my score would shoot up.

I did enjoy my time with Defense Grid 2, but after replaying some of the levels to improve my scores, I realised how overpowered the Missiles are, and how bizarre the scoring system is. Tower defence games are quite simplistic, so even though I did get 13 hours of fun out of it over 5 days, it has limited appeal in the long run.