If South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play! and Toy Soldiers have proved anything about tower-defense games, it’s that passive participation is a thing of the past. But neither of these great Live Arcade offerings goes as far with the idea of aggressive defense as we’d have liked, which is why Trenched is exactly the kind of game we’ve been waiting for.

You’ll find the same kind of off-the-wall characters and hilarious writing as you did in previous Double Fine releases like Brütal Legend and Psychonauts, but charisma takes a backseat to the engaging, involving gameplay. Trenched is a strategically complex third-person action game that barely feels like tower defense — especially in the co-op campaign, where robot allies rampage around the battlefield.

Trenched is offense-oriented tower defense: if teams don’t take the initiative, it’s game over. Even with four mechs pumping bullets into bug-like baddies, the game’s still challenging. Defeating an overwhelming number of enemies led to lots of loud celebration with our co-op buds: we had to truly cooperate, and it felt great. With spendable resources split between players, squads need to discuss what kind of turret placements should go where, all while covering those support sentries, each other, and the vulnerable home base.

Half the fun of Trenched is its immense customization options. Earning kills, nabbing loot drops, and completing missions (be it holding out to protect a hospital or going for the villains’ throat in huge boss battles) nets new weapons, robo-chassis, and turret types. Size isn’t everything, though, as much as our massive robot may have led us to believe. Sacrificing firepower and size for the sake of engineering ability — ordering more of the different turret classes, and at a cheaper rate — is often the best way to finish specific missions, and equipping speedier legs or bringing landmines is a must when keeping three structures safe. We preferred beefing up on massive firepower, and changed to a turret-centric support role when the going got tough, giving us a greater understanding of the different paths to victory.

We’ll be replaying the campaign a bunch just to experiment with various robot types — half for kicks, half to gold-medal each mission. We cooked up a few emergent objectives to challenge ourselves further: try completing a late-game mission without flak cannons, or give a mission a go without equipping any of your robot’s weapons — turrets-only is tough. This control, both in and out of the warzone, makes Trenched a marvelous action game that outshines everything in its class.

On Xbox Live Arcade

+ Robots! Explosions! Co-op! Robots! Even bigger explosions!

+ Versatile customization enables enormous replayability.

+ Expert balance of action and strategy.

? What new toys will we see in the inevitable DLC?

9.0