Defense Grid

Allow me to be the voice from the dark side as I have seen so far only the praise, even from the reviewers and I found that disturbing. Let's face the reality instead. Why do I do that ? Because I hope my analyse may help to create even better sequel ... I love TD since I first met Azure Defense map in Warcraft and so I played quite a lot of them. There are well done aspects in this game and I will not repeat them - others already did that many times. Also - I finished story on challenge level with (I think) all gold medals. *** SPOILERS *** 1) BALANCE - Cannon way too strong I won all maps on gold victory with ONLY cannon towers (where available of course). No need for any other tower, unless if you want even better score, you can create command tower for more resources. No need to use any other tower and that is IMO sign that the game is extremly unbalanced and when I discovered this during the normal difficulty and since that the game lost most of its appeal to me. -15% 2) AOE towers too weak Even though I intesively tried many times I almost could not find the situation where using AOE tower would be more effective nor resource wise then using single target tower (especially cannon, but even gun towers were often more effective against group then AOE tower ) -10% - SUGGESTION: change AI of AOE towers and make it on default attack the biggest group available within its range (flame, meteor) 3) TARGETING There is no way to choose target for the towers, even if game advices several times (!) to kill some specific alien asap. Is that some kind of bad joke? -5% - SUGGESTION: Mark / unmark the alien and it will become the primary target for all towers in the range. 4) VARIABILITY -10% - aliens: while their abilities are well done and introduced, they still visually look the same since mission 1 - towers: in reality there is even less towers then it seems (gun/cannon; laser/flame/concussion/meteor; temporal, command) Why not add some acid effective against heavily armored enemies, electricity causing occasional critical hits and stuns, some synergy towers ... - missions: really, after all that visual and design effort, it is still the same patern in each mission: weak, strong, groups, boss, fast boss; I would love to see missions enhancing one aspect or another - it would add to strategy layer and also it would help to use different towers in different missions All right, so I would rate 70%. 100% - 40% for the above issues +10% for the separate flight routes, music and the voice. And I will distract another 10% if they will not add the editor soon. Check for the Azure Defense map in Warcraft or even for freeware Byteality Tower Defense; both have better gameplay AND the mission editor ..