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Defense Grid: The Awakening is designed to be the definitive tower defense game experience designed specifically for Xbox LIVE Arcade. The role-playing game lets let up to four players hack, slash and smash their way together through a hand-drawn landscape.

Defense Grid: The Awakening has 20 unique environments, each with a different placement of roads, tower build locations, and open areas to plan a strategy around. Each level encourages a different strategy, such as trying to find an optimal path to redirect enemies, making the best use of limited space, and breaking up individual enemy waves to avoid being overwhelmed, all while planning ahead for future waves.

Genre: Strategy RPG

Publisher: Hidden Path Entertainment

Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment

Online Play:

Local Play:

September 1, 2009 –
Even though tower defense games seem to be perfect for digital distribution platforms, Xbox Live Arcade only has one: the lazily-ported Crystal Defenders. Well, Hidden Path has more than made up for the genre’s poor showing on XBLA and delivered one of the very best strategy games around in Defense Grid: The Awakening. Available on PC since last December, this is a highly polished effort that stands out in an overcrowded genre. Plus, at $10 it’s half of what the PC version costs and includes bonus maps. No strategy fan should overlook this one.

Tower defense games task players with building sentry guns that will shoot down incoming hordes of enemies. Instead of having direct control of the action, you’ll need to think strategically and plan ahead so your towers can do the dirty work for you. The story is minimal, but it’s more than we usually get in these sorts of games. In the distant future, aliens have all but wiped out the human race. In order to send the crustaceans packing you’ll need to activate the titular Defense Grid and save the planet. To help you out with strategic advice, alien data, and friendly encouragement is an affable computer AI with an adorable British accent. He used to be human, and lost the battle against the aliens 1000 years ago. Over the course of the campaign he’ll flesh out the story and lend some personality to the game.

Stop the aliens from making off with your power cores.Aliens will enter each map from one or more locations and take the shortest path towards your power cores. Once they’ve got their greedy little claws on the cores they’ll make for the exit. You only need to hold onto one core to win a round, but you’ll receive higher marks for keeping more. If an alien is gunned down while carrying a core, the power source will slowly float back to its base. Another alien can pick it up, though, which creates some interesting problems.

As I said, the interlopers will always take the shortest path to your cores.Some levels will let you influence their path and lengthen the journey for them. If you block their route entirely, though, they’ll charge head first through the force field that protects your towers