I have spent roughly eight hours of the past week dutifully averting my paternal gaze from my children to build towers and watch helplessly as aliens steal my power cores. Was my childrens’ hunger and subsequent weight loss worth it?

BACK INTO YOUR BOX, DYLAN, DADDY’S WORKING! Ahem…read on to see.

When Hidden Path sent me a free code to review Defense Grid: The Awakening on Xbox Live Arcade, I was all, “How nice, a free game to play.” Then I downloaded it, and like the boy who opened the Baby Ruth bar only to see it was actually a dried piece of human feces, I was disappointed. A tower defense game?

"The best defense is a good offense" - Mel, the cook on Alice.

Now, admittedly, I am a nerd. But I am not a tower defense nerd. No offense, DG:TA, but I have to draw my nerd line at banging on plastic drums by myself in the dark. I could never enjoy the passive staring and dimestore strategery that is implied in tower defense games, could I?

To paraphrase our President, “Yes I could.”

The game is based on a few simple premises. Aliens, who are kind enough to travel in singly file lines with varying degrees of slowness, and who lack any discernible offensive abilities of their own, march from their base towards your base. Their mission is to bogart your power cores and take them back to their lair.

Your only defense against this is to build towers on the predetermined squares on the grid to attack them and save your cores. You will be doing a total of two things when you play a game like this: building/upgrading towers, and watching.

Having said all this, I am shocked at how fun it is! There are a total of 10 different tower types for you to erect *teehee*. My personal favorites are the the Meteor tower (which fires a fiery meteor at long range), the Tesla tower (which fires lightning bolts and plays a mediocre cover version of ELO’s “Signs”), and the Temporal tower (which emits an energy pulse that slows enemies within it’s range).

These (and all of the other towers) can be upgraded with resources that are gained each time you kill an enemy. Upgraded towers increase in damage dealt, radius of attack, and rate of fire. It’s like having an email inbox full of would-you-like-a-bigger-penis spam. For once, I can publicly answer: YES!

"...and the sign said that long-haired, freaky people need not apply."

The graphics are quite pretty, the effects are nice, and there are three comfortable zoom levels to keep mama bears, papa bears, and baby bears happy, though I found the middle zoom level to be jussssssst right.

There is strategy in the physical placement of your towers, and each new map requires a slight tweak in your gameplay. Enemies come in waves, as good enemies should, so you also must time your building and upgrades carefully, as there is about a 10-second delay for the building/upgrading process. Thankfully, the right bumper button is mapped to speed up the action, so you can speed up the killing process as you wait for more resources to build.

The music is somewhat underwhelming. It was like Hidden Path could afford a mid level movie composer like Hans Zimmer, and even he phoned it in. No, I take that back; it’s more like he texted it in. Pretty weak stuff. It’s a good thing this was on Xbox, because I quickly switched to my own random playlist, densely populated by Bob Dylan, Muse, and (oddly enough) Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. Perfect music for frying the mindless, marching alien drones.

Although I would have liked a few more gameplay types (campaign is the only option in the beginning), at the end of the day I was very pleasantly surprised by this wonderful little game. It kept my attention when I should have probably gone back to finish Shadow Complex, Halo, or Uncharted even. Not bad for a ten dollar game amidst such heady competition.

I thank you, Hidden Path, for opening my eyes to new levels of geekery. Oh, and my infant daughter thanks you for her eating disorder.