Xbox's Major Nelson has reminded everyone that Microsoft's new loyalty program, Xbox Games With Gold, will be releasing its first free game later on today.
Defense Grid: The Awakening will be free for all Xbox Live Gold members from now until July 15th, when the second free game will be announced.
If you cannot recall what was announced at E3 in June, the 'Games With Gold' program is Microsoft's response to the PlayStation Plus reward system, in which PlayStation Plus members get full game downloads of specific games each month.
Defense Grid: The Awakening is your basic tower defense in which you try to prevent aliens from stealing your power cores. You use your resources to build different towers to defeat different types of aliens.
The game does put some unique spins on the classic tower defense genre, though; for instance, you do have the chance to reclaim cores if they are taken by defeating aliens on their journey back through.
Defense Grid: The Awakening has 20 story levels, plus four bonus levels to battle it out on, along with over 100 challenge modes and 15 different alien enemy types.
It also features a leaderboard so you can see who's best among your Xbox Live friends. There are 12 different achievements to obtain, and the game rates your performance for each scenario as well.
The best part about this game is that it's a good spin on the tower defense games that almost everyone has played. It's very easy to pick up and play. Any gamer would be able to figure this out quickly.
One of the only negatives I can see about this game is that the Xbox 360 version just feels like a port of the original PC game, right down to the mouse icon. It could use a little Xbox polish. That said, you can't really expect much from a four-year-old game in that regard.
Defense Grid: The Awakening is a great first title for Microsoft's new 'Games with Gold' program. It's simple, easy to pick up and play, yet tough enough that you will have to think it out to be able to achieve all of the medals and achievements.
