Defense Grid 2

In preperation for next week’s E3 festivities, Microsoft has announced that they are having their biggest sale of the year on all things Xbox. The E3 Week Sale will start …
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Microsoft have now confirmed the free Games with Gold for May 2016. As always, Xbox Live Gold members will be able to download four new games; two on Xbox One …
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This week’s schedule is as follows:

Wednesday, October 29th @ 9:00 pm (CST) – Defense Grid 2 with Marshall.

Thursday October 30th @ 9:00 pm (CST) – Warframe with …
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Defense Grid 2 was developed by Hidden Path Entertainment and published by 505 Games. It was released on September 23, 2014 for $24.99. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Defense Grid 2 (DG2) is the long-awaited sequel to Hidden Path Entertainment’s popular tower defense game, Defense Grid: Awakening. The familiar alien-blasting action takes place on the Xbox One and looks great at first glance. A shining addition to the title is co-op and online play: the first game was a single-player experience with leader boards being your only interaction with friends. DG2 is not trying to break any molds or re-define the genre; it’s simply fulfilling the need for a solid tower defense game, and doing it relatively well.

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This week’s schedule is as follows:

Tuesday, September 30th @ 8:00 pm (CST) – Recurring Tuesday Stream with Marshall. This week: Defense Grid 2 – As promised, back again …
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This week’s schedule is as follows: Tuesday, September 23rd @ 8:30 pm (CST) – Recurring Tuesday Stream with Marshall. This week: Defense Grid 2 – Released today!

If there …
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Defense Grid 2, the follow-up to the 2009 original, finally has a release date — that of September 23, 2014.  The original Defense Grid: The Awakening is well-liked, combining the …
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The crawlers keep crawling, and the drip keeps dripping in Defense Grid 2.

Hidden Path Entertainment’s sequel to its 2008 tower defense game features a new resource and score system known as “the drip,” and it works exactly as planned: it makes games winnable for greenhorns while keeping aces chasing after higher scores that are achieved by killing crawling aliens with all manner of haste.

Never having played Defense Grid: The Awakening, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect out of its follow-up when I picked up the controller at PAX East. From the outset, the player is confronted with a multitude of options for defending the base from unwanted pests and a cluster of information tracking your progress in this endeavor. The amount of data and options on the screen paired with the constant march of baddies out of their gate, towards my tower and back again with poached cores in tow could have been overwhelming. It could have been, but it wasn’t. Hidden Path Entertainment saw to that with its streamlined presentation of data, tower building options and drip-drop of resources. Everything was pleasantly intuitive and easily manageable.

Sometimes, divorce is the answer

Being intuitive for beginners while remaining fun and challenging for experts is exactly what Hidden Path was aiming for with its sequel. Though it’s impossible to report on the latter, I can tell you that the studio pulled off the former with aplomb. The drip, which Polygon first reported on here, allows for resources to constantly accumulate as a line graph tracks your score in the upper right corner of the screen. Regardless of what your score is, your resource distribution rate remains the same. The rate of the drip in the PAX build allowed me to erect large quantities of a mixture of the six tower types present (cannon, missile, laser, gun, inferno and tesla) and upgrade many of them to carry more firepower.

Executive Producer Jeff Pobst explains that his team separated score from resource distribution in Defense Grid 2 in order to avoid the “negative feedback loop” that many players got stuck in due to poor decision making in the first game. As Pobst describes it, novices would waste too many of their resources early on building the wrong types of towers or placing towers in poor positions. This would leave them unable to repel enemies and unable to gather enough resources to compensate for their mistakes. Meanwhile, top players would dominate early on and find themselves with an embarrassment of riches, making victory too easily achieved.

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Hidden Path Entertainment has announced it will be premiering Defense Grid 2 on Xbox One at PAX East next week. Representatives from the developer will be present to give …
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