Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Jim and I both had brief, torrid love affairs with last year’s indie-but-shiny, berry-obsessed tower defence title Defense Grid: The Awakening. We weren’t alone – it hit #3 in the Steam charts back in October. Now this defence game is on the offence again, having made the jump to a boxed version for the online’n'DRM-fearing crowd. Seems as good a time as any to sit down with its developers Hidden Path Entertainment and chat about the whys and wherefores of this lovely wee thing, and what they’re working on next…
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Normally we save our excitement about temporarily cut-priced games for our weekly Saturday bargain bucket post, but this one’s a little bit special. Both Jim and I are devout admirers of sparkly indie tower defence game Defense Grid: The Awakening, but whenever we’ve written about it previously we’ve bemoaned its surprisingly high price. Get it under a tenner, we cried. Now there seems to have been some sort of glorious overcompensation…
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Jim tried valiantly to get us all to play this back in December, but unfortunately I suffer from a rare, tragic medical condition that means it takes at least three months to react to anything anyone says to me. Waitaminnit, Obama’s president? And the Beatles have split? Man!
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Previously I articulated some positive feelings towards Defence Grid in this here blog posting. More recently we are to discover, thanks to the eagle eyes of one Sam Jeffreys, that the demo for the game is now available on the Steam digital download service. I think that you should have a play of that demo, if you have not already played the game. In fact I insist.

Tower defence games are a peculiarly compelling niche within puzzle games. Perhaps it’s because you are still ultimately shooting stuff that I find them so entertaining, but I suspect it’s a little deeper than that: they are a tinkerer’s delight, a kind of fine-tuning of instruments and setups to discover what works best. It’s the classic pastime of toying with a machine, carefully learn how it works, and figuring out how it could be improved. While I’m playing these I’m a boffin in a shed at the end of the garden, searching for the best solutions to pointless problems. Defense Grid: The Awakening is one of the best tower defence games (yes, I’m spelling it with a c, I’m an Englishman) I’ve ever played.
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