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| X-Morph Defense by Mischief Maker 03/02/2019, 11:37am PST | ||||
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| Godawful name aside, this is the greatest tower defense game ever made. It's a better maze-builder than Grid Defense. It's a better "give the player something to do during waves" than Kingdom Rush. It's prettier than any TD I've ever played AND it runs silky smooth on my aging rig!
The premise is you're leading an alien invasion of Earth. The aliens are like a cross between the Borg and Michael Bay Decepticons (minus the fart jokes and product placement) and the defending Earthlings have a near-future militaristic anime look that's straight out of Raiden IV. To assimilate the planet, your mothership drops giant vulnerable terraforming cores from orbit that come under attack by Earthling militaries. You play the alien consciousness who pilots a transforming fighter plane flying around the battlefield Herzog Zwei-style building defense towers and taking out strategic targets in the enemy convoy directly. Sometimes the Earthlings attack with a gigantic battlemech with individually targetable limbs and weapon systems. The ensuing urban chaos is rendered by an engine with full building destruction physics, including skyscrapers that can topple over, crush a convoy of tanks beneath them, and leave a permanent wreckage forcing the Earthlings to take a detour. You have up to nine tower types available and all towers have the ability to generate a laser fence between them, forcing tanks (but not infantry) to take longer detours. Unlike Defense Grid, squares your towers occupy are very small relative to the roads and creeps so you have lots of room to be creative and turn a wide intersection into a convoluted accordion of death. Towers come in 3 cost tiers, but all of them occupy a specific role and you don't upgrade them. It's something I really like aesthetically because a line of 10 artillery guns carpeting a street with explosions are so much more satisfying to watch than one super duper artillery gun shooting one great big explosion at a time. The plane you fly is a transformer with 5 modes that can be switched instantly. Enemies come in 3 general categories: ground, air, and heavy, so you have a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none basic mode, three modes specializing in one type of enemy, and a ghost mode where you're invisible and intangible so you can concentrate on building towers and collecting extra scrap. Action/tower defense hybrids have always been a tricky balancing act and X-morph errs on the side of TD. Your ship's main guns aren't any more powerful than their equivalent tower and your charge up super shot leaves you vulnerable for a couple tense seconds while the enemy tanks fire mercilessly and squads of helicopters harass you. You aren't going to hold off the entire column by yourself, but you do need to surgically take out support vehicles like healing tanks or artillery that bombards your towers from out of range. But most of all I've gotta gush about this game's engine! Like I said before you can easily have dozens of artillery shells blowing up tanks in big chunky explosions while buildings are being blown to bits and collapsing to the ground and yet with all this carnage and all these particle effects floating everywhere, the game runs like butter on my 6-year-old machine with a GTX 960 graphics card. A system that chugs when rendering too much smoke from a single missile strike in Battletech. Finally on a personal aesthetic note, I hate how in so many games where you ostensibly play the bad guy, the writers chicken out and turn the "good guys" into the Spanish Inquisition or otherwise justify your evil actions. No so in X-Morph. The Earthling soldiers all have heroic voice actors and it's perfectly clear that when the aliens finish terraforming Earth humanity will go extinct. There's even a little dark humor at the beginning when the aliens are scanning the solar system and almost decide to take Mars before choosing Earth instead. My only real complaint is the lack of extra keyboard controls to quickly select and place specific towers. Instead everything has to be done from a console-friendly popup menu on each individual tower. Also this is a game that mislabels "easy" as "normal" and your only clue is your map score getting chopped in half at the end of every round. This is the best Tower Defense made to date. And it has endless modes for replay value. I give this my highest recommendation. |
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X-Morph Defense by 03/02/2019, 11:37am PST  There is a demo available on Steam. I played it. Good stuff! NT by 03/02/2019, 1:16pm PST This looks rad as hell. by 03/03/2019, 7:56am PST I bought the gog version with all the expansions included. by 03/03/2019, 8:52am PST I did buy this and have been playing it. It's really difficult! by 04/11/2019, 7:08pm PDT |
