SHREEKZ

After completing the brilliant Defense Grid: The Awakening (DG:TA), I immediately installed Defense Grid 2 (DG2), eager to see how it stacks up against its legendary predecessor. Right off the bat, DG2 hooks you with a better, more fleshed-out story that directly continues the narrative from DG:TA.

One of the first things you’ll notice in the core gameplay is the welcome addition of difficulty levels. Casuals can cruise through on the easiest setting, but if you’re a hardcore gamer or a TD veteran, you should settle for nothing less than a Gold Medal on Elite difficulty.

The scoring system has also undergone a significant strategic overhaul. As in DG:TA, your score increases after every alien kill and from interest generated on unspent resources. However, DG2 introduces a brutal penalty system. Should an alien snatch a power core from your housing, the game heavily penalizes every kill you make while it remains missing. To truly maximize your score, you have to engineer your defenses and killzones so that the aliens die before they ever touch your cores.

To help with this, DG2 includes excellent new tower abilities. Depending on the tower, you can now kit out your arsenal with devastating effects like lingering chemical damage, slow-on-hit modifiers, or shield-shredding capabilities.

There are some fantastic Quality of Life (QoL) improvements here that make planning your defenses much smoother. The game now marks tiles where you can’t build a tower with a red cross, since doing so will block all possible alien paths. You can also see exactly how much time it will take for an alien to exit the map, or visibly track the burn damage as they get roasted by an Inferno tower.

The campaign maps themselves are undeniably great, though I have to admit I still prefer DG:TA’s map design. Content-wise, DG2 also feels a bit lighter; there’s only one DLC expansion available, compared to the four excellent DLC expansions we got for DG:TA. Including the Aftermath DLC, you get 25 maps in total in DG2. In comparison, in DG1, the base campaign plus the DLC maps give you 48 maps in total.

DG2 attempts to expand its scope by adding multiplayer, featuring both co-op and competitive modes. But sadly, it’s incredibly hard to find a match. Because the game is quite old now, there are barely any active players left. Despite the dead multiplayer and a smaller DLC footprint, Defense Grid 2 remains a highly engaging, polished TD experience with solid depth that will test your mazing skills.

Ultimately, DG:TA edges out DG2 in my book thanks to its superior map design. However, I prefer DG2’s scoring system, and it is overall nicer to play owing to the QoL improvements.

MY RATING: 9/10