Now that I’m officially on break from WoW, it’s time to get back to some of the other games I already had going.

So, today I finished off Defense Grid: The Awakening. I haven’t mentioned this one before since I actually started it while I was on Christmas vacation. I completed the first half-dozen or so missions back then, and today I finally went back and did the rest of them (there’s 20 in total, I think).

It’s a “tower defense” game, where the goal is to place towers on the map in order to stop waves of enemies that are trying to steal your “cores” from a particular spot on the map. There are different towers with weapon types that are useful in different ways, different styles of map layouts (wide open and you have to influence the enemy’s path by tower placement, or straightforward paths with few weapon spots so you have to choose carefully), and different enemies (slow, fast, stealthy, shielded, flying, etc.). You have no direct control over the towers; you just choose where to put them and when to upgrade them to more powerful levels, limited by your scavenged resource meter, but the possible options are still overwhelming enough that you need a solid strategy in your choices.

There was only one mission that I failed outright, but on a handful of others I did have to use the ‘checkpoint restart’ feature to rewind back a bit and try a different tactic. It usually wasn’t too difficult to complete each level, though I rarely managed to retain all of my cores. The final mission was fairly tense, with the final wave of aliens playing hot potato with my last and only remaining core while I frantically upgraded towers along the return path as I was mentally screaming “AAAAAAAH”, certain that I was about to lose. I just barely scraped by, though upon reflection I certainly could have chosen a better path.

There are different modes you can play each level in for some extra gameplay, but there just isn’t time. Next up…is a secret.