Defense Grid: The Awakening is a really good commercial Tower Defense game for the PC and Xbox 360 Arcade. I bought the game when it was available for 5$ (well 5€ for me), but I think it’s worth the 9$ (or 9€ for me) that it’s available for at steam right now.
Defense Grid, being a Tower Defense game, is of course all about the Towers. There are 10 towers in total and they can be upgraded twice. You get introduced to a new tower during each of the first 10 levels of the game. In this guide I will describe all the towers and how to best utilize them.
Gun Tower
The Gun Tower is the cheapest tower in the game and have a medium range and a rapid rate of fire. It’s not the strongest tower but it’s pretty good throughout the entire game. It’s effective versus shielded enemies, best versus single targets and it’s better than most towers against fast aliens. The tower can also fire at both land and air targets. A fully upgraded Gun Tower can handle a decent amount of aliens on it’s own and can sometimes be a really worthy investment.
Since it’s the cheapest tower a good use for it is to create a path for the aliens to follow before you can afford more expensive towers, when the map allows.
Inferno Tower
Placement is really important when it comes to the Inferno Tower. It has a short range and it’s damage vs single targets is less than desirable. According to the developer’s blog, it needs to be firing on at least three units before it does more damage then a gun tower.
The best placement of an inferno tower tends to be a location where it can fire straight ahead into an oncoming group of aliens at a corner. The Inferno Tower is weak vs shields.
Laser Tower
The Laser Tower is a pretty strong tower. It has the same range as the Gun Tower and it’s especially useful versus fast enemies and also vs strong aliens. But it’s pretty useless versus shielded enemies. It also has a damage-over-time effect when it hits its targets, which is why it’s a good tower versus faster enemies that keep taking some damage after they are out of range.
Fredrik 'Grey Fox' Henriksson is an avid Civilization and StarCraft 2 player as well as a wannabe game designer. When he isn't playing games or working on mods he likes to paint digital art, watch tv-series, a movie or just hang with good company. 