X-Morph: Defense (PlayStation 4) Review

Tower defense and shoot 'em ups are two genres that are on the opposite ends of a spectrum. While tower defense is all about defending a location from invading enemies, the shooter genre often puts the main control in the role of the attacking force usually penetrating the defense. Therefore this mix of genres might seem odd at first, so it might come as a shock with how well X-Morph: Defense has managed to blend these two genres.

The gameplay is based around the frequently told classic story about an alien race invading Earth to consume it and its resources for their own nefarious needs. It's a tale heard many times before, and it this story continues as expected with all of humanity uniting against this seemingly invincible threat. But there is a twist: the control will be on the invading aliens.

The goal is to protect the alien core by building a defense, and also attacking the enemies in a classical space-shooter style. These two gameplay modes mixes surprisingly well as the tower defense aspect of the game helps support the shooter elements by creating fences to make the route longer, while the shooter aspect supports the tower defense with the possibility to shape the environment and by destroying troops that gets through the defense obstacles. To master X-Morph: Defense, learning to combine these two aspects well will be essential.

X-Morph: Defense contains an "easy" mode that is designed in a way to focus the gameplay down to the most desirable form of play method. Whether it's approached from a tower defense aspect, or focusing on an almost purely shooter experience, the mode does leave the preferred method open. This is a feature that genre-lovers of one of, or even both of the game styles, may use to strongly enhance their experience.

In addition to this fine single-player experience, there is a co-op mode that mimics what the "easy" mode already tries to do. Co-op mode requires splitting up the roles, with one focusing on building defense and collecting resources, while the second role focuses on taking down the military forces. It is an extremely nice way to create gameplay that can be played both as traditional co-op, but also as an asymmetrical experience.

While the game is really good, it is sometimes unstable. The loading times can sometimes be extreme for what the game is, and crashes are not that rare. This is a thing that will hopefully change with time, but currently it can be very annoying, sometimes waiting minutes for the stage to load after a death or even when loading the stage. Sometimes a reset might even be needed to get out of the loading screens in a reasonable time frame.

This is a very problematic and sad problem to have in an otherwise extremely fine title. Experiencing the game on the higher difficulty settings, where trial and error is key to success, becomes an extremely painful process. Each death is like playing Russian roulette with the gaming system that sometimes results in painfully long loading times, and in other cases, soft reboots.

Other than this intermittent issue, X-Morph: Defense is a wonderful title for both tower defense and shoot 'em up fans alike. Fans of both should be able to buy this in a blink of an eye. Hopefully a fix for the game crashes and constant reboots will be out sooner rather than later, as it puts a dampener on the overall experience.