Defence Grid 2 builds upon the surprise hit of the original with a miriad of new and welcome features. The original revived the Tower Defence genre and also allowed it to take the leap from free flash game over to a full retail release. That was not unwarrented, it oozed charm in it's voice acting and visual simplicity. Thankfully the voice acting is back and indeed expanded with a cast including that Bioware favourite Jennifer Hale and Firefly alum Alan Tudyk, both of which are exactly as excellent as you would expect!

In the natural expansion that comes with being a sequel there appears to have been a good deal of confusion. Menus are mindbogglingly unintuitive to cycle though, it brings back awful memory of the dashboard that shipped with the Xbox 360 on launch (trust me, it doesn't hold up). There's plenty of game modes that seem well designed and add lots of life to the intrepid builder, but they are quite hard to track in the interface. I think my biggest complaint is that somehow it has done the impossible and has had a visual downgrade between itterations.

After a few rounds you get used to the clunkier visuals and settle into the varied and polished gameplay. There's some great length to the campain, expanded by the dozens of variations and challenges per mission, it really does give you some wondeful value if you want to even complete 1/5 of the modes available.

In summary, while on the surface making something as simple as tower defence work on a larger scale may seem easy, DG2 finds a few of the faults that have defeated some of it's competition but it still exhudes the charm and polished gameplay that made DG1 such a runaway hit. If you want more Defence Grid, here it is!

Defence Grid 2 builds upon the surprise hit of the original with a miriad of new and welcome features. The original revived the Tower Defence genre and also allowed it to take the leap from free flash game over to a full retail release. That was not unwarrented, it oozed charm in it's voice acting and visual simplicity. Thankfully the voice acting is back and indeed expanded with a cast including that Bioware favourite Jennifer Hale and Firefly alum Alan Tudyk, both of which are exactly as excellent as you would expect! In the natural expansion that comes with being a sequel there appears to have been a good deal of confusion. Menus are mindbogglingly unintuitive to cycle though, it brings back awful memory of the dashboard that shipped with the Xbox 360 on launch (trust me, it doesn't hold up). There's plenty of game modes that seem well designed and add lots of life to the intrepid builder, but they are quite hard to track in the interface. I think my biggest complaint is that somehow it has done the impossible and has had a visual downgrade between itterations. After a few rounds you get used to the clunkier visuals and settle into the varied and polished gameplay. There's some great length to the campain, expanded by the dozens of variations and challenges per mission, it really does give you some wondeful value if you want to even complete 1/5 of the modes available. In summary, while on the surface making something as simple as tower defence work on a larger scale may seem easy, DG2 finds a few of the faults that have defeated some of it's competition but it still exhudes the charm and polished gameplay that made DG1 such a runaway hit. If you want more Defence Grid, here it is!