Defense Grid: The Awakening isn’t a bad place to start if you’re a newbie to Tower Defense games. That’s me: newbie black. My experience with the strategy-genre was when Command & Conquer hit the PS1, that crappy Aliens vs. Predator game infected my old Xbox 1, and the really underrated Halo Wars offered a new opportunity for RTS games on the current hardware.

I’m a graphics whore, oddly, and unless I see hundreds of little detailed characters marching to their digital deaths, I’m unhappy. Now, I omitted the fact that I played Battle For Middle Earth because my PC rig at the time just didn’t have the heart for it, and by the time it rolled around on the Xbox 360, something just wasn’t quite grabbing me.

So here’s Defense Grid, one of the few actual RTS games on XBL, it’s cheap, so I give it a try.

Microsoft is insidious with their trial games. They’re just small enough to download without being annoying, and just cheap enough to add just one more purchase to your credit card without thinking you’re breaking the bank.

Basically it’s the coolest part of RTS games, i.e., defending your base as hordes of enemy troops march to their deaths due to your careful tactical planning. You set up various weaponized ‘towers’ to stop the alien bum rush jockeying to steal your power cores. Whatever. Shoot the aliens, set up stopgaps, shoot them with bigger guns, watch them all fall down.

It’s really a question of how quickly can you plan your attacks, and how much firepower is at your disposal. Short answer = quickly and LOTS.

Endless fun. Digital crack. I haven’t been able to stop playing since I got the demo. Downloading the full game was inevitable. 800 MS points.