Defense Grid 2

The player takes on the role of the commander, tasked with defending bases, colonies, space stations, and outposts from waves of aliens attempting to grab and escape with the power cores housed in each location. The player views the game from a top-down perspective and has the ability to build various towers that attack and route the path for the waves of aliens. Once an alien reaches the power core housing, it will make its way back towards the exit. If the alien is killed on its way back, the core will drop and slowly float back to the core housing. Different towers provide various abilities that are good against different types of aliens so the player must build a strategy to defend the cores against all waves of aliens.

Killing aliens gains resources along with slow generation of interest over time. Resources are used to build and upgrade towers which can be sold at a loss. Tower upgrades increase various statistics including fire power and range. Most towers are similar to those in the original game.

Hidden Path Entertainment started their Kickstarter campaign for Defense Grid 2 on July 10, 2012. It received $271,726 on August 14 that year, only enough to fund an 8-level expansion, Defense Grid: Containment, for the original game which bridges the story gap between the original game and Defense Grid 2. The expansion was released on January 23, 2013 after a beta with the Kickstarter backers. However, $1 million was needed to fund the complete sequel so Hidden Path began reaching out to investors.

A deal was made with video game enthusiast, DG2 Kickstarter backer, and angel investor Steven Dengler to fund the completion of Defense Grid 2. A suggestion website was made available to backers and later to the general public where people contributed ideas for inclusion in the game. One result of this was the boost tower, a very cheap tower that blocks the path of the aliens and also upgrades other towers built on top of it.

Defense Grid 2 received positive reviews from critics following its release. Aggregating review website Metacritic gave the PC version 81/100, the Xbox One version 78/100, the PlayStation 4 version 77/100, and the Nintendo Switch version 73/100.

Dan Stapleton of IGN gave the game 8/10, praising its replayability factor with the inclusion of modifiers for the towers, maps and levels, while criticizing the writing of the singleplayer campaign's story and the multiplayer gameplay for being "slow and crippled" compared to singleplayer. Emanuel Maiberg of PC Gamer, giving the game 83/100, remarked that the game "isn't doing anything I haven't seen in previous tower defense games, but it does it all so well."