So Defense Grid was my introduction to tower defense. Since then I've played two of those Orcy games, Sol Survivor, Plants vs Zombies, Sanctum, Dungeon Defenders and perhaps some other shit I've forgotten about. Of all of those ... Defense Grid is the only truly pure TD game. Sol Survivor is close, as the interaction is limited, but the other ones all dumb down the TD mechanics in exchange for more action elements, for better (Orcs Must Die) or worse (Dungeon Defenders, ugh). Ironically, or not, there's a reverse bell curve in action; the more action game, the worse. Then the better!
Defense Grid is very, very pure TD. The tension doesn't come from running around or fighting Orcs, but in very carefully aligning the load balancing of the grid. Doing a fight well requires increasing amounts of precision, on two planes. First, when and where aliens die impacts your "recovery" rate, which is both in terms of interest, access to interest and a couple other little things. Second, the way your towers are structured - the build of the maze - relies on committing to the plan and guiding it as it goes. A couple towers spin into a maze, and then the maze's parts align together to do force multiplication until you have killzones that dispatch ten times the number of aliens the towers would if they weren't working in tandem. I'll talk about this again in a moment.
This is primarily a review of the two newer DLC map packs. The game itself, if you like tower defense games, is an extremely polished and consistent TD game that offers a pretty plentiful amount of gameplay I logged over a hundred hours on the main game. Your brain never quite ignores the battlefields you're plopping towers down in, so the visual flair the game tries to present is surprisingly not lost in the explodey nonsense. I don't know if that's the result of being striking, or just having little pauses in the gameplay.
More than any other TD game I think Defense Grid's polished mechanics deliver on gameplay that is tower defense without relying on anything else. The whole resources into interest mechanic, with its little little minigame of your cores providing that interest rate, can really switch up how a map is played when you're trying to do a higher difficulty version or "gold medal" the map. Like I said above, you want an ideal kill zone, with all the little multipliers acting on a maze. Sometimes you can pass a map with a killzone right after your "core", which leads to lower interest and less resources. The solution - in terms of scoring higher - can sometimes be rethinking based around higher frontloading, or knocking down specific alien types before they run off your cores. That they die later without scoring a "real" hit on you can sometimes still be really valid, all stemming back to that one little change in the resource system.The game isn't flawless, though it's very pure and very tightly woven around its core elements. The path the aliens take through the map can be routed in some and less routed in others, creating different styles of map. However, some of the maps are extremely long and complex, requiring a ton of do-overs, checkpointing and rethinking. All of which is fine! But the game can create some oddities in the tower targeting, where something you spent ten minutes setting up fails for reasons you can't quite figure out or because the towers just decide to not shoot what you'd imagine is a priority target. The worst of this is the 'seeker' aliens, which spawn a set number of aliens from portals within them. Towers for some odd reason always flip to what was just spawned, so seekers can take an age to go down (and usually through weapons inverse to the other weapons you'd front end with)
I don't have any issue with that, it's a cool mechanic that rewards frontloading towers at the "start" of the map which often enough isn't what you expect to do. My problem is the AI partner goes TARGET THEM FIRST and ... Well, he doesn't, you can't and often towers seem to just casually ignore seekers for other meaningless targets, making you grind your teeth. Little oddities like stuff hitting or not hitting, or how temporal towers can screw up the targetting on meteors but only on the super fast aliens all come up when you're trying to sort through one of the huge maps that require building a good fifty or so towers.
Ok so the two DLC packs I had were Borderlands and Resurgence. Borderlands has some pretty swell maps, though they're non-story, while Resurgence I just can't quite remember. I recall them both being pretty good though. The two I recently bought were You Monster and the kickstartered (which I'll get into) Containment. I believe the former was spun out of some bonus maps that the Hidden Path guys did for the Portal 2 event or something relating to that.
You Monster stars, loosely, GlaDOS woken up in the future on some human colony, and it's your job to sort her out. The story is feeble, which is fine. The voice actress for GlaDOS is good, and Fletcher (that's your AI) gives some great lines. Some of the maps are supposed to be simulations, while others are out in the proverbial real world. The maps are good and the mechanics are good but the game has one serious issue: GlaDOS is annoying. And not in the cute way she is prone to, but rather some of the maps go like this: GlaDOS talks, then talks, then talks more. Then you place a tower and try to figure out: Was that the right spot? If you got it wrong, you get to go back to the full fledged start, which is GlaDOS doing the same yammering festival.
A big part of my play time on DG was replaying maps over and over. Better scores and different modes, and stuff. A big blob of not-especially-funny AI talking just ... Makes me not want to do it, even if I don't think she talks in every version of the map.As such I can't really recommend You Monster; it's fine and some of the mechanics are neat, but it's surprisingly light handed and honestly? Kind of a little boring having done all the other content previous to it. Which moves us to Containment, which is where things get a little heavy-handed. Containment is not the product of kickstarter but rather the byproduct. Whether you want to read that as a reference to containment being a container full of poo or being the delicious gravy produced from the drippings of a sunday afternoon kickstarter roast is entirely up to you. Those are your two options though: Toilet or gravy boat.
I'm not against Kickstarter at all, though I do feel like the way Kickstarter works is a little bit sketchy. I'm not sure people truly understand that KS is, on a fundamental level, throwing money down a wishing well. Inversely it also represents a lot of weirdness in funding; tiers and rewards can end up eating up Kickstarter money or ruining a company's plan, and in the end KS just gets a big chunk of the money themselves. On a personal level it sort of bothers me simply because KS represents the IP hype machine. IP is, on a fundamental level, worthless in the gaming market space. It says and does nothing for whether or not a game will be good or live up to its hype. Nothing. It never has and it never will. Anyone who feels this way should go look at the history of their top 5 favorite IPs. Yet people are rabid nutcases about IP and Kickstarter seems to get people all worked up over sequels to ... Well, just about everything. I will admit I am a little excited for the Divine Divinity: Original Sin kickstarter which is over here abouts. And no I've never played a DD game, I just feel like that kickstarter tells people exactly what they're getting, has reasonable tiers, good rewards and good legitimate information instead of vague landscape shots of some game they'd like to make.
Time will tell if we ever see Kickstarter produce any of these major big deal titles that people have been raving about. So what's this about being a Kickstarter byproduct? Well, the guys behind Defense Grid wanted to garner some additional funding for the Defense Grid sequel they are working on. Which I am glad they are working on, because I really liked Defense Grid. Their "goal" was a million dollars, but their funding started at 250k which would unlock this very DLC. I don't remember the exact numbers, though I know they didn't get their million. They're still to my knowledge working on the next game and Containment was pushed out to Steam to act as sort of a bridge between the stories of 1 and 2. This is sort of a weird moment, and maybe you can define why the whole process feels a little weird to me on that one.So is Containment any good? Well, the voice acting is good and the story is interesting - moreso actually than much of the original game. The locales are really neat - One of the maps is holding the alien hordes off from attacking a space port and you can watch shuttles launching as you fight. And if you really liked the polished maps from the first game, Containment does feel like a really solid extension of them with all the bells and whistles of the original game that are sort of lacking in the other DLC. The problem is, Containment really feels exactly like the original game. There are no new towers and I don't believe there are any new aliens, so it's basically just another map pack. A pretty, fun and interesting map pack, but still just a map pack.
That's all well and good - I had a fine time with it - But it's really hard to recommend a third basic map pack, even as cheap as it is. I'm still looking forward to the sequel and hoping it comes out, as this pack is definitely well polished but ... That's just it. It's just more quality maps, and unless you're really excited for more quality maps you probably don't really want to run through the paces again. If it goes on sale in a pack I think owning the entire game is fine but you may never get all the way through DG's piles of content. Which is a good problem to have, I suppose.Though, again, DG is probably the best tower defense game I've played, and certainly the best if you don't want to fight with Orcs or do fps nonsense or just want to sit with a mug of hot coffee and muse on the perfect tower placement. Very zen tower defense, I guess.
Here's hoping for the sequel.
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