We Love It's Guide to…
Build and upgrade towers to redirect alien waves from power cores across shifting maps, campaign missions, challenges, and multiplayer.
Released 23 Sep 2014
Shape Alien Paths
Upgrade Tower Effects
Defend Power Cores
Great strategy is timeless. Build, adapt, and defend across dynamic maps, solo or online - every session brings new strategies, new solutions, and new surprises. Now is the perfect time to enter the grid.
Developed by Hidden Path Entertainment · Published by Hidden Path Entertainment
In this sci-fi tower defense game, you defend power cores from alien attackers. Place towers around the map to damage enemies and influence the routes they take toward their targets.
Choose from different tower types and upgrade their effects to counter varied enemies. Each map changes as battles unfold, and tower placement, timing, and resource use shape how well your defenses hold.
Play a story campaign solo, revisit maps in challenge modes with different rules, or take on co-op and competitive multiplayer. The game also includes tools for creating custom maps.
Players who enjoy the game often praise its strategic tower placement, range of towers and maps, and challenge modes that encourage replaying stages with different approaches. Some also like its voice-acted story and co-op options. Other reviews criticize its progression, balance, or changes from the first game, so enthusiasm for those aspects varies.
New five-mission story chapter with Aftermath DLC
A full story-driven campaign with 21 dynamic maps
Online co-op and player-versus-player multiplayer
Hundreds of replayable challenge mode variants
Large, open-ended levels with multiple strategic solutions
Steam Workshop support and powerful level creation tools
Full voice localisation in Chinese, Korean, Spanish, English, French, and German
Improved widescreen support, stability, and performance.
Defense Grid 2 remains one of the most refined and rewarding tower defence games ever made. With deep strategy, dynamic maps, and endless replayability, it is a true classic. Whether you’re discovering it for the first time or returning to the grid, there has never been a better time to deploy your defences.
A full story-driven campaign across 21 dynamic maps that shift as you play, forcing constant adaptation. This is tower defence with real depth that rewards planning, experimentation, and mastery. Every tower placement matters, and every choice carries weight.
Aftermath adds five large, open-ended story missions that continue the conflict with Fletcher and Governor Tydell. On a distant world where enemies can mind-control their attackers, your mission is to stop future invasions at the source.
This chapter also opens with a fully voiced cinematic that sets the stage for what’s to come. This isn’t just more maps — it’s the next chapter in the Defense Grid universe.=
Play the campaign solo, defend together in online co-op, or challenge other players in competitive multiplayer. With hundreds of challenge mode variations and shifting rules, no two battles play the same. The grid always has a new test waiting.
DG2 now features full voice localisation in Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Spanish, alongside English, French, and German. Text support has been fully updated for the new DLC, widescreen support has been improved, and the launcher has also been upgraded with better news and content access.
The Defense Grid 2 Complete Edition (coming soon!) includes A Matter of Endurance, a fully voiced 30-minute audio drama by Hugo Award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal. You’ll also receive a 300+ page behind-the-scenes development book and two full digital art books from DG1 and DG2. Jump deeper into the Defense Grid universe.
With its timeless, deep tactical gameplay, competitive and co-op modes, powerful level creation tools, modern updates, and the all-new Aftermath DLC, Defense Grid 2 is more complete, more playable, and more exciting than ever.
If you’ve been waiting for the perfect time to jump in — this is it.
| Platforms | Windows |
|---|---|
| Achievements | 65 |
| Age ratings |
|
| Controller support | Xbox |
| Controller required | No |
| DLC / extras | 2 listed on Steam |
| Content notices |
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| Metacritic | 81/100 View on Metacritic |
| Website | Official website |
