Score: 8.0 – XBox Live Arcade – 800 Microsoft Points ($10.00)

Last week, we gave our preview coverage of Defense Grid: The Awakening and after getting the time to play through the full retail release of the game, it definitely lived up to our high expectations of the game. Defense Grid: The Awakening towers over the previous XBLA Tower Defense Game, Crystal Defenders as well as every free flash tower defense game on the internet in not only graphics and control but most importantly in fun. It has also set a high bar for South Park Let’s Go Tower Defense which is coming out in the coming months.

As described in our preview coverage, the game continually evolved with each level. From the addition of upgrade levels and additional tower options to the change from preset Path type maps and hybrid maps, there is constant variety over the course of Defense Grid. For each of the first 10 levels, the game adds a new tower in each level except in level 8. Here is where things get really interesting as an orbital laser that takes much of the time spent in the level to charge up to get ready to fire, but it allows for a 1-shot kill that garners no experience. But it’s one heck of a last resort weapon to preserve those last few precious cores the player must defend from the alien invaders.

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As we had done with the Summer of Arcade, The Flickcast has done its best to keep you abreast of the latest downloadable releases for XBox Live Arcade. (Keep an eye out for special download code giveaways for XBLA games in the near future). To help with that, we recently got some time with today’s XBLA release, Defense Grid: The Awakening . By the time of this posting, it should be available for download with a trial and the full game for 800 Microsoft Points ($10.00) on the XBox Marketplace.

For those who are unfamiliar with the title, Defense Grid: The Awakening is originally a PC tower defense game. With the popularity of the up and coming genre from simple Flash-based games, it has recently made its way to handhelds and consoles with titles like Pixel Junk Monsters and Crystal Defenders. Developer Hidden Path set out with the goal to make the definitive tower defense game by looking at what they considered the 84 best tower defense games, such as like Vector TD .

For their efforts, Defense Grid: The Awakening received numerous PC game awards such as PC Gamer Editor’s Choice, one of IGN’s Top 10 “2008 Games You May Have Overlooked”, and Gameindustry.com’s 2008 Game of the Year: Puzzle. We got the chance to sit down with Hidden Path developer Jeff Pobst who talked with us about the process of creating a tower defense game. In their research they found out there were two main types of tower games.

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