Defense Grid Review

Defense Grid - Writing a review now before I forget the key point I want to make *God I miss raspberries* One of those games that has sat at the top of the Steam review charts since before steam really opened up it's library. Defense grid is a relatively basic yet extremely solid tower defense. With a delightful mix of mazing and tower/enemy variety to really make finding an efficient solution to each map a delight. If you're hungry for content, you'll find it here. Gold medal score challenges and like 5+ challenge modes for literally every single map in the game. It's smart about it's assets and a very solid experience, easy to lose a night doing mission after mission chasing those gold ranks. That's not what I'm gonna focus on, cause instead I'm going to point out one of the most user friendly design decisions I've experienced in the genre so far. Often the key thing of tower defense is that while you have a few "lives" to lose. The real victory comes on a perfect map clear. Well that's **extremely** tedious when you lose that perfect rank 9/10 waves in because an enemy with 1hp skirted past your last tower and into safety with your core. When that HP variance could've been down to RNG or even just a half-second delay in building. So Defense Grid's solution? *Just give you some checkpoints*. They save your tower, enemy placement, and basically savestate the map. You can reset to them instantly at any point, they come every few waves, and you can rewind back through them by double tapping the reset button. This takes all the bullshit out of the game as far as knowledge checks or having to reset from zero. Since it is frankly rare that you'll get 90% of the way through a mission with a totally unviable strategy without realizing beforehand. It means rather than having a pre-set build order in your head. You can react and upgrade as needed. (You're incentivized to wait until the last minute to build by gaining "interest" on your resources, and thus score) Meaning the game can either be about clearing, or more enjoyably, about seeing what the *bare minimum* is you can get away with building to clear any set of waves. It's fucking fantastic and I don't know that I'll be able to go back to long TD games that don't have it unelss they can have other really solid hooks in the gameplay elsewhere.

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