Defense Grid: The Awakening

I picked this up on Steam earlier today. I'm a couple of hours in, and I like it and I want to keep playing it, but I can't beat Focal Point. No matter what I do, given my finite amount of resources, I can't come up with a strategy that doesn't result in half my power cores being carted off before I can do anything about it.

I've beaten the game a while ago, and I might be able to give advice, but I can't remember what that map looks like.

It's big and open and by the look of it very heavily focused on channeling the enemies where you want them to go. It's basically a big square of separate interconnected platforms, with the entrance in one corner, the exit in the opposite corner, and your power cores off in a third corner.

Sorry for the delay, I booted up the game to see what worked. That's definitely an early tough one though. It's harder in the beginning than it is at the end, so if you can get past that it's a long home stretch.

What I did was wall off the front so they have to turn left and then wall the second island off so they have to keep going left. On the second island I put a Cannon as part of the wall. Thus, when they run back around the cannon has enough range to keep shooting at them. You also need to wall off the escape route with cheap towers ASAP so they have to run back past your cannon for a third time. That's the hard part, and I cut it ridiculously close when I did so. After that first scare though, just keep adding cannons to good places and upgrading everything and it's home free. I ended the mission with 9000 extra resources and got a gold medal. If you just want to progress though you don't have to cut it as close as losing half the orbs in the beginning won't matter too much after you get your pathing up.

edited 19th Apr '11 3:26:59 AM by Clarste

That worked about as well as I could hope. Thanks!

It seems like I was trying to get too fancy before. A simple gauntlet of nothing but gun towers and a few cannons and lasers got the job done much more effectively.

edited 19th Apr '11 3:48:04 AM by SuperDimensionman

Guess who stars in the new DLC Defense Grid: You Monster! - hint, not Chell.

Pretty much. The main towers you'll need are:

1. Gun Towers
2. Missile Towers
3. Meteor Towers
4. Temporal Towers.
5. Command Towers.

You'll almost never need more than 2 Missile Towers, and only sometimes will you want to invest in a Laser Tower. Also the Gun Towers are a kind of Magikarp Power, not that good when green or yellow, but great when leveled to red.

edited 2nd Dec '11 5:03:44 PM by Spirit

Love the logo for the You Monster DLC.

This game is way more fun than it has any right to be, considering how much it relies on Trial-and-Error Gameplay, at least if you want to beat a level with more than a handful of cores left. Luckily, the checkpoint system makes it relatively easy to "rewind" just far enough to fix your mistakes. I bought it as part of the Potato Sack bundle back before Portal 2 was released, and it's the one I've put the most time into by far.

edited 5th Dec '11 6:27:10 AM by NativeJovian

I have it on XBLA.

Downloading You Monster now. Was disappointed that it was 400 MS points where the other add ons were 80, but they weren't as large as this.

Edit: Two missions in and so far so good. Won't award me achievements for some reason.

edited 7th Dec '11 9:37:31 AM by Spirit

Bought the game during the Steam sale. Been loving it so far, though I want to play the You Monster levels in order and the first one is giving me trouble. >_<

Use a Cannon tower to force them to turn left when they come in. That'll make them have to run past three towers in a row, make those towers a Gun, Temporal, Gun. Then setup a Laser tower on the next row down, with a Command tower behind that. You can work your way from there.

Word of warning in later levels, Glados cheats.

Good to know. My last attempt resulted in a gauntlet of Meteor towers, but they slipped through on a later wave.

Yeah, you need a supplement of Gun and Cannon towers to bring down shields and a Temporal tower to bunch the aliens together to make a Meteor tower worthwhile. Even then if you're going for gold then you need to hold back on Meteor.

Picked this game back up. Rather satisfying to figure out effective strategies for levels that gave you so much trouble when you first played the game.

By the way, has anyone tried the Containment DLC yet? I'm waiting for the next Steam sale.

Thank a single fan for Defense Grid 2.