Defense Grid: The Awakening
BANGER · Strategy · 2008
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 11.4h
- Value
- $0.88/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, Video: DirectX 9 video card with shader 2 support such as the following:, 1 GB of storage. Windows only.
Defense Grid: The Awakening is a unique spin on tower defense gameplay that will appeal to players of all skill levels. A horde of enemies is invading, and it's up to the player to stop them by strategically building fortification towers around their base.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $1.49, set in December 2014. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 51 in the 14 years tracked, about 13 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 13 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 70 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. The nearest things to it, Super Sanctum TD ($4.99, scores 74) and Sanctum 2 ($14.99, scores 82), are both worse buys on this math.
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $15.45. It costs $9.99.
The press gave it 81; the people who bought it give it 96 percent. A 15-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data puts 25 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. None of the 384 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 77 percent of the 200 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
11.4 hours to finish it, 104 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 9.1 times the campaign.
The drop-off
93% start to 25% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
55 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
It's been quite a while ago but this was a great Tower Defense type game. I enjoyed playing many of the levels multiple times
This is an awful Tower Defense game. Some levels are close to impossible to complete on normal mode. There are no external upgrades outside of the levels. It's one of those annoying TD games where you have to place towers to reshape the path. The controls are a bit fidgety. The AI voice is annoying and offers little help.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Defense Grid: The Awakening scores 93/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/18500/defense-grid-the-awakeningThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.