Defense Grid: The Awaking was created by Hidden Path and released late last year on the PC.  They have now released it on the XBLA making it the only 2nd tower defense game on XBLA.  It has been ported over perfectly, unlike the 1st tower defense game on XBLA, Crystal Defender.  Defense Grid is highly polished and has plenty of strategy involved with the game.

As with all tower defense games, you goal is to build tower that have different guns, abilities, and ranges to kill the hordes of enemies that come at you.  You don’t directly control the towers, only place where you want them to be which is where the strategy comes into the game.  You need to figure out what types of towers are good verses certain enemies and where they are most affective.  Each tower type can also be upgraded to level 3, with every upgrade the attack, range, or ability gets better.  Each tower costs a certain amount of resources to build which you gain when enemies are killed.  You will eventually start to gain “interest” and will slowly gain resources when you have some saved up.   

The enemies, which are aliens who have come to attack your planet, come in from one or more points on the map.  Their goal is to steal your power cores and then exit the map from one or more exit points.  On some maps they have a certain path they have to take and on others you can affect the path that they take, which makes for multiple strategies.  When an alien dies with a power core it is dropped and slowly starts back to its home, but during this time another alien can come and pick it up and start towards an exit.  Each map has a certain amount of waves that the aliens come in, and as the wave number increases more and harder enemies come in.  Throughout the game as you get more towers you will also come across more types of enemies, some examples are little aliens that swarm together to big boss aliens with loads of health.  Throughout each level you also hit check points which you can revert to if you screw something up by just hitting the “back button”.  You can even go back multiple check points if you have to instead of starting all over.

The main campaign has 20 levels in which to play.  The game also comes with 4 bonus maps that the PC didn’t have.  Along with playing the store mission on each map, some maps will have challenges for you to do.  Some have the amount of towers you can build restricted while others give you a certain amount of resources to start out with.
The whole time as you’re playing you have an AI who is helping you through everything.  His voice, which is British, is good voice acting and rarely gets annoying.  He also tells you the story behind the game as you advance in the levels.  He’s also the one who updates you on the new towers you get as well as the new aliens you come across.  The only bad thing about him is that during the level he will say things like “Here they come” and you most likely hear things repeated during the levels and hear them a lot throughout the game.  Along with the AI there is also an orchestral score playing sometimes which is nice to hear, instead of just the towers shooting and aliens dying.  

The graphics are really good considering it’s only an arcade game.  The lighting is done really well as you will notice the shadows of everything in the game, including the structures and the towers that you build.  The towers themselves are also done really nice.  Each has many moving parts that flow very nicely.  I rarely ever saw a frame rate drop in the game even with multiple enemies and towers on the map at once.  The only time I saw the frame rate drop was doing a grinder challenge which sends in 99 waves of aliens, each with more and more.  So near the end there was just so much going on.  But during the regular campaign your rarely have that happen.

9.3 - Presentation: No bugs what so ever to be seen, plenty of levels, and easy to get into with the difficulty going up as you go further into the game.

8.9 - Graphics: Lighting is done very well, each tower type looks unique, and frame rate rarely suffers because of all this.  

8.8 - Sound: Good voice acting, but could be some better sounds for the different types of towers.

9.0 - Gameplay: A very addicting game that has consumed hours of my time.  A very well done strategy game, one you can’t miss even if you like them only a little bit.

9.0 - Longevity: Only single player, but the first play through to beat the game takes multiple hours with each level getting harder and taking more strategy to get through it.  Add in the different challenges of each map there are a lot of things to be done.

Overall: 9/10
Afterthoughts (no effect on final score):  With the price of the game only being $10, half of what it is on the PC, makes this a really good buy.  I have played this game a lot and have had a good challenge on some maps that made me think hard at what I needed to do to beat the game.  The achievements in this game are no push over either.  It will take time to get the 200/200 in the game.