Back in January, I played a gem of a game on the PC called Defense Grid. It’s a tower defense grid with a futuristic setting which has players defending some version of Earth against an onslaught of aliens. Now the game is out on the Xbox marketplace. Curious to see what control and interface changes they had to make to fit the console, I devoted a few hours to the game.
The controls are perfectly suited to this game. Fast-forwarding with a trigger button is so intuitive that I didn’t even need a pop-up tool tip to tell me that. I also liked that they mapped the option to quickly revert to the last quick save to the ‘back’ key. It made it almost instantaneous to reset to a previous version of the map.
Alien information can be displayed by placing the cursor (controlled by the left analog stick) over the alien and hitting B. A nice little status box pops up showing their health, weaknesses, and other helpful tidbits. Towers are easily built and upgraded by hitting A, selecting a tower or an upgrade.
I found myself losing lots of time in this game just because it’s such a pleasure to play and I didn’t have to step back and fight with the controls. The animations and graphics are done nicely with very little slow-down even when things get hectic on screen. Playing Defense Grid on my larger television screen makes it feel like a new experienced compared to my old 19" monitor.
Published: Sep 20, 2009 09:10 am