Hidden Path Entertainment, an independent developer based in Bellevue Washington, has announced that its critically acclaimed game – Defense Grid: The Awakening – will be available on Xbox LIVE Arcade at a special price of 800 Microsoft Points beginning September 2nd, 2009.

Defense Grid: The Awakening’s unique spin on the Tower Defense genre is a perfect fit for the Xbox LIVE Arcade audience. The controls are intuitive and the gameplay is deep - the special attacks and properties of each tower work together to provide many ways to succeed. New for the Xbox 360 is the included Borderlands mission pack which has four new advanced levels and twelve challenge modes, providing more bases to protect and more challenges to undertake than ever. A trailer of the Xbox LIVE Arcade version of Defense Grid: The Awakening can be found at http://defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/.

Defense Grid: The Awakening on Xbox LIVE Arcade features ten different tower types that can each be upgraded twice. These towers all have unique tradeoffs that affect ideal placement, such as line-of-sight attack or ballistic trajectory fire; a large area of effect or damage over time; and minimum and maximum ranges. Over the course of the game’s ten hours of story play, players battle fifteen different types of enemies, each with unique capabilities and strategies, across twenty four unique environments. To ramp up the challenge even more, Defense Grid: The Awakening now includes an additional one hundred unlockable challenge modes.

Built on Emergent’s Gamebryo engine (which also powers The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Warhammer Online, Civilization IV), Defense Grid: The Awakening has been repeatedly lauded by the critics for excellent game balance, pace and progression. With each level, players encounter different placement of roads, tower build locations, and open areas to plan a strategy around. Each map, whether open plan or fixed route, encourages a different strategy, such as trying to find an optimal path to redirect enemies, making the best use of limited space, and breaking up individual enemy waves to avoid being overwhelmed, all while planning ahead for future waves.

Defense Grid: The Awakening will be available on September 2^nd, 2009, for 800 Microsoft Points. Electronic Theatre will keep you updated with all the latest from Hidden Path Entertainment.

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