Unstoppable Gorg

I was more or less immediately sold on this game due to the amazing theme. Yes, it might be an indie game and theme a mere coating on the cake that is the gameplay but I still think this game might be worth picking up for its quirkiness factor alone, that is, if you are a fan of Ed Wood films and green men in garish Technicolour.

The game is a Tower Defense game that puts you in charge of all sorts of precious revolving earthling planets and space stations in peril. All sorts of aliens are sending wave after wave towards your planet / station in order to drain it of its energy and have it explode to smithereens. The player's only chance is to feverishly deploy, upgrade and research defense units he can build onto the cosmic rings (Is that what they are called?) around his planet. The twist and maybe the best (or at least the most innovative) feature of the game is the ability to rotate these ring at any point time, this moving around your defenses if necessary. Yet, the relative positions of your defenses on the ring itself remains static and sometimes you will find yourself in a situation where you might want to turn the ring around because you are in dire need of the rocket launcher, but doing so will move the research station right into the armada of the flying saucers.

As you would expect from a tower defense game, both enemies and the player have many units at their disposal and you have the usual balanced mixture of light and fast enemies, long range but slow weapons, anti-alien (but not anti-brain) weapons, mind control enemies, repair units, money generators etc. There is a healthy variety in here without overwhelming the player at any point and you can adjust your array of available satellites / defenses before each level.

There are two things I did not like about this game however. First of all, it gets too hard too soon. I don't mind a hard game but I also expect the game to make be a good enough player before throwing its best at me. Let me do a few more medium range levels before you put me in a ring with the Ultimate Warrior will ya ? Hence, I found myself repeating levels for dozens of times, refusing to play the game of the easy difficulty level, all the while noticing that I am playing on the second out of four difficulty levels and feeling like a big fat loser. Yes, the game is hard and it is far less about reacting on the fly (as you might think) than about analysing the level through reposition and ultimately solving the puzzle of defense by coming up with the perfect combination and order of defense mechanism. And here lies the second grip I have with this game, I would have enjoyed a bit more randomness in the levels. Yes, the developers need to control the difficulty level, I understand, but just a few possible pathways or numbers of enemies or frequencies would have done this game good, this way, I know the level by heart after a few attempts and it becomes far less exciting, let alone immersive.

The game comes with skirmish and challenge modes but all in all, the story mode is where it's at and while the hardcore fans will enjoy the potential playtime they can get out of that, I am not really into those kind of things, if they game is good enough in itself, I want to finish it and am happy to let it rest in peace.

All in all, a neat twist on the TD genre, packaged into an amazing production value and atmosphere. But it seems that indie developers from around the world have made it their calling to cater for the hardcore players now that the mainstream AAA titles all become noob-core (too easy). I found this one a bit too harsh and steep to learn.