Welcome to our review of Xmorph: Defense, where you are the invader in this tower defense game! Out now on Nintendo Switch
You are the X-Morph – an alien species that invades Earth to harvest its resources and terraform the surface. Strategize in the build mode by carefully selecting various types of alien towers or throw yourself right into the heat of the battle. Build mazes for incoming enemies in an environment that provides exceptional planning freedom. Tear down buildings and collapse bridges to support your defense or to simply indulge in a spectacle of unprecedented destruction. Possess a range of unique alien weapons and use defense strategies as you’ve never seen before in this genre.
I will admit I do not generally enjoy this genre very much. At most I consider it lightly boring and lacking energy at first. Usually, I will have lost my attention by the time I get to the tougher levels and will have moved on to another game.
Xmorph takes a new approach from the majority of other games in the genre, You are the invader and you need to protect your home base in order to expand. As you do this, you get to invade and conquer other regions of the Earth, each with their own quirks and difficulties.
As you progress through the game, you are taught more and more ways to outsmart the puny humans and stay one step ahead of them. You will learn to build turrets to fire at incoming humans, whether they are fighter jets, tanks or even oversized mechas that appear to have been taken out of your everyday mech anime. A giant-sized mecha tarantula? This game has it!
It does not even stop there, you get bombarded with enemies and while your main defense method is an alien space ship, you will learn to depend on the ground weapons you build around the place. Recover stuff that got destroyed so you can build even more.
Build laser fences to make the humans take the long route to your home base, allowing multiple turrets to fire at them the entire time. Upgrade your own weapons while flying around the field in order to help defend whichever place is the most vulnerable or get thrown off guard when suddenly the enemies come from an unprotected side. Yeah, that happened to me and it gave me quite the thrill. Something I usually do not experience in this genre in the initial levels.
As you can read, I did enjoy this game a lot more than originally anticipated. I dislike the generally slow pace of tower defense games but the addition of the fighter plane that you control, it adds to the challenge. While it seems like it is a big help, you also get enemies coming at you. This game becomes quite hectic from the get-go and I must say, I approved the pace of action.
This is also a game for the more advanced lovers of the genre as even the easiest difficulty setting proved to be more than just very easy. While the tower itself was very strong, it did often take a lot of bullets on the enemies before they went down. Eventually, you can upgrade your arsenal and all, but it does start off with quite the bang!
In conclusion, Xmorph Defense was surprisingly good. My general dismay for the genre was conquered, conquered the same way as I was conquering the map. A surprisingly fun game with a cool approach to a genre I tend to dislike. I was enjoying this game very much!
