Defense Grid: The Awakening

Update April 2019: Hypercrate has temporarily made the videos private (the one embedded works but not the playlist). I have reached out to him to see if he will open them up again.

Hey all, huge fan of this DLC, and a lot of the reward is in completing it yourself, however, this playlist has ALL the gold videos you need to get through.

No other youtube channel I've come across has even close to all of them, all of his videos are clear and he has recorded every single mission in the campaign which is greater than 35, so even with his help if you struggle there are several others you can do.

For some levels, 'Surprise Party' and 'Divided Attention' in particular you have to pay particular attention to the timings in the videos for you to succeed.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE138460AC6CC27A7

All credit goes to him but if you have any issues with any of the achievements I have played it extensively and will be willing to help out.

Edit: the story challenge of command decision doesn't work here, the video is posted in here now, or the new solution (that copies mine but with some probably nice new pointers) below, hope that helps =)

This is not a solution, however this is a very good technique to make the freezes the game suffers from less painful.

It would seem it is generally the games with the high volume of waves that suffer from the freezes, where they completely lock your X-Box.

My suggestion is when you see the "CHECKPOINT SAVE" in the bottom fight corner flash up, wait for it to disappear, press START then EXIT TO MAIN MENU. You then press A, this will save your progress up to this checkpoint.

You are then returned to the MAIN MENU. Press PLAY, select YOU MONSTER, then go to the last game you were playing. You are now presented with an option to RESTART or CONTINUE - PRESS CONTINUE. You will then be back into the game where you left off.

This takes seconds to do and if you get a game crash this type of save will not be erased by the X-Box freeze and lock-up. If you get a freeze, go back into the game, select your level and press CONTINUE - are there you are - you do not have to start from scratch.

This will save you hours of frustration and re-play time.

For 35 gold medals, I suggest skipping the following levels:
Command Decision: Frozen Core (FC sucks!)
Interference Pattern: Frozen Core
Portal II: Out of Bullets (Tough level to do it on.)
Portal II: Balanced Build (Tough level to do it on.)
Surprise Party: Super Grinder (Easy gold but always freezes!)
Surprise Party: Poison Core
Surprise Party: Frozen Core

For any other mission type on any other mission, you can pretty much always just employ the same tactic as you did in story mode. Sometimes you'll have to place one or two towers differently, but basically, the more Meteor towers the better. Here's a refresher link to some gold strategies, originally posted by Vr English:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE138460AC6CC27A7

Keep in mind that the videos posted for this game are almost always for the PC version and due to minute differences between the versions, the PC videos don't help for the 360 "Command Decision" level. Here's a video that works perfectly and is easy to follow:

The above guides are great, I would recommend using Hypercrate's videos on Youtube as a guide, but pay attention to the Command tower ranges, I recommend adding more command towers to better cover the mazes to get more resources and boost your score. Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/user/hypercrate

Also, there is a serious glitch with the game which causes 2 problems; the first problem is an error message that pauses the game and says that your achievements cannot be updated. Ignore that one. The second glitch is a lot more major, it freezes your Xbox and you have to power down and restart, erasing all of your progress. To remedy this, I found it necessary to clear my cache and erase and re-download the "You Monster" DLC, only erase and re-download the DLC though, not the main game. I had to do this a total of 3 times, but I eventually stopped getting the freeze glitch and was only getting the error message glitch.

Since there are no other solutions on here that have valid videos for most of the levels, I'm posting the videos that I've confirmed to work to get through some of these levels. For the most part though, I was able to get a lot of the challenges done using techniques employed during the Story or Story Challenge levels (see those achievement solutions for those levels, it'll net you 16 levels towards this achievement). This is not an exhaustive list of videos for this achievement (because putting that together would be exhausting). Instead these are videos for levels that I had difficulty completing with my own tactics.

Mission 2: Divided Attention: Balanced Build - This video actually worked, but again I was unable to keep up with his resources. My workaround involved not fully upgrading the second concussion tower near the lower core storage until around wave 21 or 22 I can't remember exactly when but it was at a point that I had excessive cash. Hopefully it'll be easy to work out. I never fully upgraded the meteor tower on the pedestal either, but I was still able to complete the last two waves with ease.

Edit: Another item of note that I forgot about until I rewatched the video. When the seeker slipped by his defenses around wave 6 or so, I didn't have that problem. I had killed all the seekers near the entrance. I did have to step back a couple of times, because I couldn't keep up with his resource generation and wasn't able to build the extra towers when he was. I did get those towers built for the later waves though.


Mission 2: Divided Attention: Out of Ammo - I tried and tried to get this on my own, but kept failing miserably. I even tried it with these two videos. I cannot keep up with their resource generation, and they seem to be able to take out the Rumblers in wave 23 much easier than I do, and I can never get the shields off of the Spires in wave 24. If anyone can come up with a way to make either of these work, I would love to hear about it. I've put the videos in spoiler tags, so hopefully you'll read this and not blame me for posting a video that doesn't work .



Here's another video I found for this level that I couldn't get to work either. Again, there's another spoiler tag...



Mission 3: Lack of Support: Poison Core - Video worked great, though I did end up about 700 points less than the video, but I still had enough for the gold medal.


Mission 6: Interference Pattern: Frozen Core - Doing this level with this video makes this a piece of cake. I was even, amazingly, ahead of his resource gain for most of the mission. I had enough to fully upgrade the two command towers before he had (not right away though), and was eventually able to way out-score him.


Mission 6: Interference Pattern: 10 Tower Limit - This video works great. You may not get the resource allocation he gets at the beginning, but it's not a big deal. You just have to watch out for when to sell the end gun tower to draw the enemies through your gauntlet. You don't need to match his build/sell timing too closely, I just felt the need to point out the reasoning for doing it.

Posting this in case any other nutcases such as myself are starting and completing this game in 2024 and beyond. I used the below playlist for every single required gold medal. I'd suggest putting up with long levels like Shredder, Grinder, and Super Grinder in earlier levels of this DLC as they'll be worth it when you get close to the 35/42 mark. All videos you'd need for that are in the below playlist, but like many other people have pointed out, you may have to alter strategies slightly due to platform differences in balancing. Generally, play the story challenge first, then use the same strategy for the story assuming it works.

Because completing the You Monster DLC requires 35 gold medals, 16 of which being the story and story challenge missions, you're definitely going to get the base game achievement for earning 40 gold medals if you simply progress through the base game's gold medal story missions or Resurgence campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyx3ruPOCg38D-lTsqTpn...