X-Morph Defense is a game that I probably would not have acquired or even knew existed had it not come up for free on the PlayStation Store. I don't remember if this was a PS Plus acquisition or one of those "Stay at Home" games that they are giving away these days. They are doing so much free stuff at the time that it is tough to keep up.
X-Morph Defense seems very reminiscent of one of my favorite Sega Genesis games of all time called Herzog Zwei but kind of in reverse. Instead of capturing enemy bases and making your way across the board your objective is to protect your base and that's all.
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Therefore, this game in my mind is categorized as a tower defense game with a twist since you are the only mobile unit on your team and can cause a lot more damage than any of your towers can. However, you would probably lose if you didn't have the towers.
The way the game works is that you have a certain time period to prepare for which direction you are going to lead the incoming horde - which in this case is actually humanity and you ARE the bad guys and then after you think you are ready the waves of attacks begins and you can not pause the action to micromanage your towers at that point.
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The paths that the enemy is going to take will be highlighted on the map and you need to place your towers accordingly. Also, two towers are capable of creating a laser fence that all but a few units are incapable of getting through and thus it will redirect all incoming tanks, Humvees and what not down a centralized path where you can concentrate the amount of towers that you have for maximum damage. This is almost exactly the same as basically any tower defense game I have ever played but with the addition of you on the screen and you are capable of attacking both air and ground units.
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Your unit is capable of dealing out significantly more damage than any of your towers can but the enemy units counter this by sending wave after wave of helicopters and fighter jets that will interfere with your disposal of the ground units.
For the most part, your towers are indestructible, and you probably couldn't win the rounds without them, even on the easy setting due to the fact that you are constantly fending off aerial attacks towards you. Most ground units can fire at you as well but their attacks for the most part are so weak that it really doesn't matter a great deal.
The enemy has a wide variety of units and between each "wave" you are allowed to redistribute your towers for an unlimited amount of time (as far as I know - I left it unpaused and went and had lunch and when I returned nothing had changed) and this is handy because just like i many other tower defense games, the enemy changes which direction they will be coming from and you need to attempt to manipulate their paths to get them all down the same one if possible so that you towers can concentrate their attacks on a single-file of units. This is easier said than done of course and on Normal setting it is still quite challenging.
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There are also boss battles, which I think was a wonderful addition to the game.
Now let's talk about the things that I don't like:
I'm not a big fan about how in campaign mode the computer seems to always "move the goalposts" and change paths and while I know this is pre-determined, it seems to be done in such a way that between rounds you are going to be moving your towers and taking a lot of time doing so. In one particular scenario, between rounds the computer decides to blow up all the bridges on the map, which you almost certainly have been corralling the waves through by that point. This now means that you are going to the have to completely redo everything on the map and this just seems like senseless time-wasting to me.
Also, since the map is not rotatable, and you can not zoom in or out it can sometimes be difficult to even determine if the tower you are placing is even capable of achieving the range that you need it to for the next incoming wave. This is particularly crap when dealing with defense against bombers since even though they always follow the same path, your towers need to be just the right distance away in order to be able to hit the bombers, but not be hit BY the bombers and thus destroyed.
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The upgrade tree is a nice touch but I don't like the way that it isn't possible to repeat previous missions in order to acquire additional points to spend here. I am the type of gamer that prefers to grind in RPG's so that the next level is significantly easier rather than go into a situation and get my butt kicked over and over. This might seem lazy on my part and hardcore gamers would simply tell me to "git gud" but I think it should at least be an option, even if it was just on the "easy" setting. Even though I am passionate about games, I am not the kind of person that likes games to be super difficult and therefore I consider myself a casual.
My overall impression of this game is that it is reasonably fun but also kind of monotonous and I think we could make the argument that all tower defense games are monotonous and that is kind of the point I guess. You can't really play this game completely casually though, because it uses almost all the buttons and at least for me, jumping away from a game like this for even a week is going to result in me not remembering the buttons and therefore probably deleting it after it is "too hard!" haha
For tower defense fans looking for something a bit different I think this game could be fun for them... I'm still enjoying it a bit here and there right now, but it is a bit old (hence the fact they are giving it away) so therefore, if you didn't get access to it for free I really don't think this game is worth more than say $10.