In all the hype and hooplah of the holiday season, there are always one or two gems that go quietly unannounced, while big name games from big name developers dominate everyone’s attention. Sarcastic Gamer recently got their hands on one of these gems: Defense Grid, the Awakening from Hidden Path Entertainment, and I’m here to tell you that for certain members of our audience, it should be on your radar.

All the juicy details after the jump.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is a tower defense game, much in the vein of Pixel Junk Monsters. Now, I’ve personally never played Pixel Junk Monsters, so I don’t have much besides the basic idea to compare it to, but when you compare the screenshots of the two, Defense Grid is much more realistic and a bit grittier. Still, I believe the basic idea is the same: Monsters are on a path to steal something of yours, and you need to put up a combination of towers in said path, to annihilate them.

The gameplay is quite simple. You start with a limited number of resources, which are used to build and upgrade your towers. You gain additional resources by killing aliens. There are special areas on each game board to place your towers around the path of the alien horde. The horde comes in waves, usually mixing different types, I.E. Sending out a huge horde of weak aliens but having a stealth-giver in the mix, or sending out a group of stronger enemies with a shield-giver with them. There are also a number of boss aliens in the game which are very strong and resilient to your attacks, but also come with a special skill like increased speed or the ability to spawn other bosses.

Let’s continue this on page 2.

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