I was less than thrilled to be assigned to review Defense Grid; I find the tower defense genre to generally be trendy and shallow, with dozens of "me too" games trying to cash in on its popularity. But Hidden Path’s take on the premise is so well done that I had fun regardless, and found that it was easily worth the 800 Microsoft Points/$10 USD they’re charging for it.

The basic premise of Defense Grid is that you and a distinctly British AI are sent to various locations, tasked with building up defenses to fend off waves of invading aliens. They want to get to your power cores at the end of each stage, and it’s your job to find the right mix of defensive towers that stop them. Unlike some tower defense games, you don’t lose in Defense Grid if the aliens just reach the cores; they must then carry them to an exit. And it’s okay if you lose a few cores, since most stages give you over twenty of them to protect. Nonetheless, this immediately seen to be a tower defense game and the overall idea should be familiar enough.

Likewise, it won’t surprise you to learn that you have a variety of towers, each better at dealing with different enemies. With the large stages and sheer numbers of enemies (usually in the hundreds per map, and of several different types), it’s important to pick the right towers and make sure they have overlapping fields of fire so that no aliens slip by unopposed. What is different about this tower defense outing is that the stages each encourage their own tactics; what works on one map may not do so great on the next. There are even three different styles of map; one where you may set towers only in specific areas, another type where you must build towers to give definition to an otherwise wide open field, and a few maps merge both of those ideas. All of this keeps things interesting through the two dozen stages you’ll be playing through.

Defense Grid’s main draw is its long campaign; a normal run through the twenty-four or so stages should last you anywhere from eight to twelve hours, and you can easily extend that by replaying them in several different modes. One mode might give you lots of money to buy towers with but will give you no extra money from aliens you defeat, while another reverses the entrance and exit points on the map. Even just a normal run through is pretty fun, as you continue to unlock new towers and abilities throughout and only the last few stages become particularly hard. Most of the time the difficulty is reasonable, and losing means you either made some minor mistake in your plan, or you overlooked something very important and addressing it will make the fight much more reasonable.

Ultimately, Defense Grid is a tower defense game, and an entry in a genre that is quite crowded already. But its good graphics and presentation along with well designed stages managed to win me over, and that’s despite my actively disliking tower defense games. The price point of 800 Microsoft Spacebucks is perfectly fair for what you get, and I’d easily recommend Defense Grid to virtually anyone.