Hidden Path's Kickstarter campaign for Defense Grid 2 edged past its minimum goal of $250,000/£156,400 back in August, providing funds for Defense Grid: Containment, an expansion for the alien-annihilating tower defense original releasing January 23 for $5/£3.
Containment continues the story of Defense Grid: The Awakening right where it left off in eight new levels and 32 challenge modes. As before, you'll herd and zap columns of aliens wandering into your tower jungle, but as Awakening's increasingly elaborate map layouts proved, the task quickly turns into a challenging frenzy of resource management and effective emplacement patterns. It's also one of the few genres that continually reminds me how amazingly bad I am at micromanagement.
Hidden Path also chose four user-made maps as a bonus pack launching alongside Containment. Kickstarter donors received access to a private forum with the Level Previewer tool, which players can use to model and preview custom levels before submitting them to Hidden Path for consideration. The studio chose four of the most popular submissions for inclusion into Containment's Community Levels, which you can get by registering an account after January 23. It'd be nice if the Previewer took the final step and allowed mappers to publish their work independently of Hidden Path's approval, but the extra content never hurts.
As for Defense Grid 2, it's still well under construction despite missing its ideal funding mark of $1 million. Hidden Path looks determined to eventually hand a final product over to fans, saying, "We'll need to do extra work on our end to earn or raise the remaining funds in order to complete DG2, but when we do, you'll still be a part of the team."
