Lately, I’ve been sucked into a video game called Defense Grid. It’s a relatively simple game concept where you build various towers to protect your energy source from a mindless parade of aliens all intent on stealing your energy source. While the concept is simple, some of the clever game mechanics has made it addictive to play. And it doesn’t help being obsessive-compulsive—trying to come up with the perfect strategy can take a few tries.
The demo got my interest, but I was too cheap to pay $20 for the game. When Steam had it on sale for $5, I couldn’t resist picking it up. And buying a copy for friends in Montana. Too bad the game doesn’t have multiplayer, but I’m not quite sure how a tower defense game would work in multiplayer quite yet.
So the basic game premise is that you and the game narrator are defenders of some alien world. The game is a sequence of progressively tougher maps where you place a variety of towers in pre-determined spots. Some times you are able to shape the enemy’s path by making a maze using towers. Either way, placement of the towers is crucial to a viable strategy.
For each map, there are 3 levels of success. If you survive the map with at least one core remaining, you receive a bronze medal. If you complete the level with none of the cores missing, you receive a silver medal. And the toughest is a gold medal, where none of the cores are missing and you achieve a preset target score, which is based on how much resources you have remaining and the sell value of your towers.
The tiered success was a great game design since it will reward casual gamers and hard-core gamers alike. For my first pass through the game’s storyline, I settled for bronze on all the maps, but I normally achieved silver. I was compulsive enough to at least try to keep any of the cores from being stolen. In my second pass of the game, I’ve worked on achieving gold medals on all levels.
It has been frustrating getting gold occasionally because you don’t get to see your score until the end, so you don’t have a clue if you’ll get gold until the level is over. Then you’d have to do the whole level again since there’s no saving during a level. Thankfully, there’s a fast forward mechanism and I generally remember what my tower arrangement was.
Despite the slight frustration, I find myself studying the map layouts (which the game developers have generously provided on their web site), and contemplating tower combination when I wasn’t playing the game. I really enjoyed the maps that required me to craft a maze for the aliens to weave through because it forced me to design forward, meaning looking ahead at where I’ll set my next tower to a final design.
I highly recommend Defense Grid to anyone who enjoy designing the perfect defense and obsessive about efficiency, strategy, and would recline diabolically on a chair while watching the enemy march to their doom.