Twin stick shooting away Earth’s Resources
Title: X-Morph: Defense
Genre: Twin stick shooting tower defense
Modes: Story, Survival
Developer: EXOR Studios
Publisher: EXOR Studios
Platform(s): Switch, XBox 1, PS4, PC
Release: February 21, 2019
Aliens are invading Earth to drain it’s precious resources, and it’s your job to make sure they succeed! That’s right you play as the aliens and fend off wave after wave of Earth’s armies to secure the resources your race needs. In a blend of a tower defense style game mixed well with a top down twin stick shooter, you help eradicate the armies of multiple countries while sucking Earth dry of the needed supplies.
The Tip and the Top
Immediately upon starting the game, you notice that there’s voice acting from both the X-Morph and the human race. Every line in the game is delivered wonderfully and with proper emotion and inflection. The X-Morph leader has your classic gruff sounding voice, while the Army general sounds like your classic movie general voice barking orders to the troops and all.
The graphics and environment are also outstanding. Almost every building that is on each map is destructible. You can use this to your advantage dropping the big buildings in the path of the army advancement forcing them to take a longer route.
The setting up of the defense portion of it is executed rather well too. A bubble appears around each structure showing what kind of range they do damage for. Each of the structures can be linked together to form an electrical barrier that forces the enemy to take a more scenic route and if you place everything just right you can funnel all traffic in to a single line making the destruction that much easier.
The shooting aspect from your craft works pretty slick as well. There are various forms that you can take with your ship depending on what you are attacking. A form that is effective against land enemies, one that is more effective against air based enemies, and one that can do damage to both. You can else go into stealth mode to help you heal up or place more defensive structures if you need to.
The Flip and the Flop
The execution of the upgrades seems a little odd to me. Quite often they don’t give you enough full points to fully upgrade a weapon or piece of equipment. As you go on through the game more items become unlockable and upgradeable, but it felt strange that sometimes they would leave you hanging.
When the game gets tough, it gets really tough. Not quite impossible, but hard enough that your thumbs let you know that you just had a heck of a battle.
The music is nothing special it’s just kind of there and repetitive. It doesn’t necessarily need to stand out, but you don’t even notice it unless you think about it. It’s mostly covered by the sound of explosions anyway.
Final Grade: B+
I honestly had a lot of fun with this concept. It brought a breath of fresh air to the tower defense genre, and pulls it off really well. If you enjoy either shooters or tower defense games, I highly recommend giving this a go as it was hard for me to find many negative things about it.
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