Greetings from Quarantine!
This one is pretty short and sweet
kind of
this game is really good at several things.
One, engaging gameplay:
instead of it being something you will set to auto advance and set up your phone in class on your desk; you will play it.
Two, Uniqueness in a very stable or stagnant genre.
And three: Having the level of polish and design to make it A: look worth its price and B: justify being a PC game as opposed to being just a pc port of a mobile game kind of like Bloons TD.
Now the first, and only barrier to entry, it has a hefty price tag for what you would think a TD game should have.
However this isn't some cheap 2d flash player game that is only worth a "heh, fun" on the toilet. When I sit down to play X Morph Defense, I am ready to GAME.
Let's begin with the first thing you see. The look of the logo and menu.
So the first thing you are drawn to is the honestly pretty cool logo that reminds me a bit of Xenoblade Chronicles X's logo. The immediate next thing you notice is the somewhat generic "techy" edges and mildly uninspired font. but DO NOT let that discourage you, this game is not defined by its theme it is most certainly the gameplay. Other TD games with a Sci-fi theme only set themselves apart by their themes. I'll stop reiterating that point
The next thing you wonder about is the story. It's simple. You are on a conquest to help your race conquer the earth and convert it for harvesting. After landing, you blow the Sh*t out of some civilians. The Military mobilizes and every mission is you defending against these vehicles.
Gameplay structure:
You actively participate as you are in a small fighter ship that assists the towers you place.
The vehicles don't self destruct upon reaching the core. You don't have a set amount of "lives". The Base has a health bar and vehicles begin firing upon it once reaching the center and will continue firing until destroyed. In addition to the vehicles that follow the paths there are support vehicles that will fire upon you as their primary goal. After each long wave (6 or 7 waves max to a mission as opposed to 40-80 of other games) the base will regenerate some health
The next thing about the game is its two sub-genres
Bullet Hell and Sandbox.
The vehicles approaching the base will fire on you as well, every vehicle will spray bullets just like a shoot-em-up. New enemy types will constantly appear and mix in with the waves in a way that's like "oh, i gotta watch out, there's a few Anti-air tanks in this horde" as opposed to, "Here comes a break in the combat and here comes the heavy unit squad." then there's the constant peppering of unique side squads of the light units or aerial units which decide to strafe your ship. If your ship gets blown up it will be rebuilt but take a few seconds which could be used to get tanks off of your base. There's (in the main campaign) a few waves of a few missions that involve a boss vehicle of some sort, and these seem to have the strongest shoot-em-up roots like they were from a Japanese arcade game like Crimson Clover WORLD IGNITION
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| Crimson Clover World Ignition is available on PC (not my photo) |
Don't take the word "Sandbox" the wrong way, this isn't an easy game on it's normal difficulty. The entirety of the maps are not simple, there's multiple paths for the enemies to take. The Towers have the Laser Fence ability which allows you to block and redirect certain paths of the enemies to make it longer for the attackers. To counter some of this, certain units can hop laser fences (usually weaker ground units which are usually countered by tower types that would be there anyways).
Your ship comes equipped with (after upgrades) many different types of abilities.
Your basic gameplay loop is to choose the tool that fits your situation best. You can switch to ghost mode to build a tower and get out of the heat. You can switch between the 4 types of primary fire. which have certain strengths and weaknesses. There are also the auxillary weapons that come with each type that have cooldowns but are powerful bursts. one can even be used to bring buildings down on enemy paths to block them!
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| Bringing down a building to redirect enemy paths. |
The strategy also extends to choice of weapons and towers. You actively change your ship weapons and tower type throughout the waves. Tower costs are dictated in bars of resources instead of set cash amounts. You gather scrap from defeating enemies which will fill up the bars. The basic tower costs 1 bar and any upgrade for it costs an additional bar. you can reconfigure the tower between upgrades or downgrade it to get refunded costs. There's a further level of upgrades that can branch off to make 3 bar cost towers. These, like ship weapons, have certain effectiveness against certain enemy types.
There's the vanilla blaster and turret which are overall ok (I found myself using it more during the late game even though I now had more options.) The missiles and anti air which are especially effective against air units, helicopters are the most noticeable one. (fun thing is most towers and weapon types work against air AND ground, bypassing the usual problem with towers.) Laser tower and weapon are great to focus down high health targets one at a time and melt their armor. and lastly the bombs and mortars which are best for groups of ground enemies.
There is one more type of tower which is the infantry type which is flamethrower/thumper. I wasn't a fan.
Each weapon you have active on your ship comes with a defensive perk (like intercepting projectiles while charging or firing) and a sub-weapon (like the antimatter bomb and black hole generator.)
Now what this also comes with is high scoring to encourage replays with new strategies at new difficulties, also there's co-op where you can go through the entire campaign in local two player gameplay with a separate save. Then there's also an onslaught mode called survival where you play wave after wave and see how long you can last!
This game is a great option for intensity and strategy at the same time.
My rating (before finishing the DLC) 963/1000
I'm bad at keeping my ideas in my head, I wrote a huge portion of this and then forgot about this because I had college stuff (almost done cause finals are next week). so I come back to this and i'm like "what else did I want to write? eh forget it i'll probably remember" so TA DA!
