X-Morph: Defense
You can really see the roots of The Riftbreaker here - it feels like that game must have naturally evolved out of this - similar graphics, grid based placement, turrets and defence against waves of enemies. I'm really glad I played this though; it's a great mix of genres (again, like The Riftbreaker), really highly polished and just simply good fun. I'm usually not a fan of tower defence games, but they've done so much right here that I actually stayed engaged throughout the story and finished the whole game.
Pros
- The destruction physics and animations are fantastic, and never get old
- Wide range of weapons and abilities to use against different kinds of enemies
- Large number of different enemy unit types, and towers to counter them
- The bosses are really well made
- Everything is destructible
- Voiced campaign
- It's not -just- tower defence - you have a huge degree of agency in how to destroy units yourself, so it's a viable strategy sometimes (when you're low on resources) to let the towers deal with one set of paths, and take the others on yourself until you have more towers
- You play as the aliens against the humans. Die human scum!
Cons
- It's a tower defence game. It's a good tower defence game, but still. More shooty, less tower building please
- Almost invariably, on every last wave of each level, all the attack patterns change. This means I basically have to spend 10 minutes selling all my existing towers and starting from scratch
- It shows controller buttons on the UI, even if you're playing on keyboard and mouse
- Building towers can be fiddly - selecting your towers is a little difficult with a mouse. Using a free movement mouse cursor that's trying to build things on a square grid can just be a little clunky sometimes
- In the last mission, heavy tanks just drove straight through one of my laser walls, and my turrets were being attacked from off-screen