Knights of the Cardboard Castle

So I’ve been putting in some serious time into Defense Grid again. Very serious time. According to Steam, my /played exceeds 100 hours, making it by far the most played game in my library. I guess I just really like the tower defense genre in general and Defense Grid in particular. At first, I only meant to play the Resurgence and You Monster DLC but then I noticed that a previous update had wiped out all my previous medals and leaderboard entries. So not only did I go back to replay everything from The Awakening and Borderlands, I also played every Story mission until I got a Gold. How’s that for obsessive? I considered getting gold on all optional map modes too but that was just too tough. Poison Core and Frozen Core modes are evil!

Some thoughts on the maps of the two DLC:

• Resurgence is just like vanilla Defense Grid, except refined and tweaked to perfection. Getting Gold on these maps is much harder than vanilla because it’s balanced so exactly that you pretty much need perfect tower selection and layout. It also requires consideration of advanced factors that are more or less optional in the original, such as line-of-sight, tower placement order, selling and rebuilding another tower in the same spot to reconfigure your layout for the next wave etc. It’s really Defense Grid at its best.
• You Monster on the hand does away with the pure tower defense feel of the original game. It’s all about map-specific gimmicks and playing around with the established rules. Part of the fun is seeing what GladOS comes up with, so no spoilers here, but you can be sure the maps are wacky. I can guarantee that you’ll be sputtering at the screen and going wtf. Of course, it’s all scripted so doing well actually entails lots of trial and error to anticipate what is going to come next. Arguably this means it’s not much of a strategic tower defense game anymore, but the voice-acting and novelty value makes up for that. One thing that does annoy me that some maps seem to absolutely require some amount of juggling. It’s a time-honored tactic in the genre but some purists, such as myself, still think of it as cheating.

Overall Resurgence is great for more of the same while You Monster is more like a fun way to end the series, but not to be taken too seriously. But both are highly recommended for folks who loved the base game.

Let’s end with some personal tips of my own. Might be spoilerish, so be warned:

• Some of the new maps are really big. These tempt you into making huge mazes to extend the path of the aliens so they travel all over the place. Resist that temptation! To do really well at these maps, it is actually more important to identify a chokepoint and force the aliens to travel near it many times than to create long paths that barely do any damage to each wave. In many cases, you can get away with building nothing at all on 90% of the map.
• Strangely enough, despite all the new things they’ve tried, good old-fashioned guns are still the most versatile and all around most useful tower. A tight cluster of fully upgraded guns with a temporal tower in the middle that a wave must move around, rather than directly through, can kill just about anything, even flyers. Never forget this.
• If you want to get really good at this game, the best modes to play are the ones that enforce a tower limit. Once you learn how to effectively create a maze with only 10 towers, you can see how it is possible to get truly high scores. The key is to be able to identify the minimum necessary investment needed to defeat each wave.
• As always, interest is vitally important. To earn interest, you must ensure that the cores stay in the housing and you must spend money only at the last possible moment. On many levels, you won’t be able to get Gold if you don’t maximize your interest.
• There are tons of YouTube videos on optimal layouts to each map, but for me the fun part of Defense Grid is treating it as an intricate puzzle to be solved, so I hate to resort to them. I often stare at a new map for 15 minutes or more before even putting down my first tower!