Finding a unique tower defence game is as hard as finding a binge drinking Jehovah’s Witness making it rain. But, in the case of EXOR’s newest title X-Morph: Defense, unique is the perfect adjective. X-Morph: Defense is a game in which the player commands an almighty alien race, attacking Mother Earth for its resources. It’s just a shame that EXOR couldn’t make this unique concept very interesting.
X-Morph: Defense, the newest title in EXOR’s catalogue, is a tower defence title, where the player is tasked with controlling the super advanced weaponry and incredible high technology of an alien master race. The player makes their way through the countries of the world, which are divided into optional missions the player has to complete to gain technologies and main missions which bring about progress to the main game, claiming them as their own and brutally destroying any force that poses a threat to this mission (which is to harvest resources). There’s a certain irony experienced when the player unlocks the US as a level, and has to harvest its resources and kill as many as possible. What’s even more surprising, however, is when the AI aliens the player is tasked to fight on this level don’t start fighting for the player. Muscle memory is a powerful thing.
What’s even more powerful, however, is the brute force of the waves of enemies that come at the layer in X-Morph: Defense. Unlike many games, the AI in this game won’t be mistaken for fighting for the player. And while the enemies in this game are largely easy to kill, the strength of the humans is in their numbers. This is challenging game and an unseasoned player with little to no experience in tower defence or strategy games will quickly find the waves of enemies have swarmed their tower, and will have toppled it as easily as a sand castle. The enemies do, however, move towards the tower in predictable paths that show up on the map, rather forgivingly in favour of the player. The goal then is to construct towers in such a way that the path for the human enemies is as difficult to get to player’s tower as is possible. But with limited resources to construct said towers, the player must be careful and clever; they must think, as if they lapse for a moment, the enemies will break through the defences and a barrage of Hellfire (the likes of which the Western world has never seen) will rain from the ground and skies on the player’s hub. The difficulty of X-Morph is to its praise.
However, despite the positivity of the interesting concept of playing as an alien in an attack on planet Earth, and the challenging difficulty that make X-Morph feel meaty, there is one crucial flaw to X-Morph: it is repetitive. After just two hours of X-Morph: Defense, the player will likely be left wondering ‘what if?’. What if there was an interesting story, other than ‘you’re an alien harvesting planet Earth for its resources’? What if the enemies had more variations that related to their respective nations? And what if the locations weren’t exactly the same with ever so subtle changes to distract from this fact? The player is bound to let loose a breath of disappointment when they finally unlock the United Kingdom level, only to see it’s identical to the prior level just with a castle. And they will definitely let loose a sad giggle when they spot palm trees on this same level.
Negatives aside; while the lack of a compelling story (or any story for that matter, outside of the kind one might expect from an eighties smut movie), and experiencing the same kinds of enemies (in most cases) make X-Morph, at its worst, a bore, X-Morph definitely excels in one respect: at being a good game. Even though X-Morph is plagued with a lack of variation, there is fun to be had. With an array of technologies and upgrades that massively impact the way the game plays, and the strategies that the player can employ (with unique levels requiring different approaches), the gameplay itself is of high quality. Furthermore, at the end of every main mission, the player is faced with a surprise attack from that nation’s secret weapon’s arsenal. A boss fight ensues. And the boss fights are fantastically varied, in contrast with the majority of the rest of the game… In these instances, the player will have to act on their feet and make quick but thoughtful decisions that genuinely make the world of difference. The boss battles, at the end of a grind (and X-Morph can feel like a grind) make this game feel worth playing. These adaptations to the genre will likely win over a lot of experienced tower defence lovers, but it’s hard to believe that the average gamer could be swayed from the repetitive and often monotonous feel of the game by something that happens so rarely.
Summary
Overall, X-Morph: Defense is a unique game which is aware of what it’s good at, and it no doubt excels in this regard. But it does little, with the exception of the awesome and huge-scale boss battles, to stray into new territories. And it’s a shame that, with such a unique concept, X-Morph: Defense fails to capitalise with anything new or unique. However, the quality of the gameplay and the difficulty of this game cannot be ignored. Players new to this genre will struggle with liking this game, but experienced players of tower defence and, to a lesser extent, strategy games will love this title.
Owain was a community contributor to ICXM, writing 2 articles in 2017 covering Xbox news. ICXM operated as an independent Xbox and Windows gaming outlet through the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative, drawing from a rotating bench of editorial volunteers.