Defense Grid: The Awakening’s unique spin on tower defense gameplay is a perfect fit for the Xbox LIVE Arcade audience, as it appeals to gamers of all skill levels, features beautiful environments, spectacular effects, and a dynamic, engaging soundtrack. 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 12 challenge modes, providing more bases to protect and more challenges to undertake than ever.

Defense Grid: The Awakening on Xbox Live Arcade features 10 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 10 hours of story play, players battle 15 different types of enemies, each with unique capabilities and strategies, across 24 unique environments. To ramp up the challenge even more, Defense Grid: The Awakening now includes an additional 100 unlockable challenge modes.

Built on Emergent’s Gamebryo engine (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.

Currently available on PC, Defense Grid: The Awakening, rated E10+, will be available on Xbox Live Arcade at a special price of 800 MS points ($10) beginning September 2, 2009.