Note: Sang-Froid is technically a beta right now, but it’s scheduled for release on Steam in March and you can already pay for it and get it downloaded to your computer so I don’t think I’m being too unfair reviewing it as a finished product. Hell, I even overlooked the two CTDs I got while playing it.

Sang-Froid is a tower defence-cum-RPG game that both looks and plays like a game from 1999. In the latter case, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The basic premise of Sang-Froid is that wolves, werewolves and other diabolical beasts are attacking your isolated cabin out in the Canadian woods, and you have to take control of one of two brothers to repel them with a combination of traps, firearms and a good old-fashioned logging axe. Joseph is a big burly lumberjack adept at both fighting and trapping, while Jack is more of an outdoorsman type with the stamina and general fighting ability of an old lady carrying some heavy shopping; playing as him counts as the game’s Hard mode. Every day starts with a planning phase where you spend action points and money in order to place wolf traps, bonfires, poisoned bait and other such goodies, and then when you’re happy with your setup the game transitions to night-time and you have to go out and hope your traps are good enough to thin the numbers of the pack to the point where you can pick off any survivors in combat.

As written that’s pretty a classic third-person tower defence game in the mould of Orcs Must Die, but to make a direct comparison between the two games would be to do Sang-Froid a disservice. Orcs Must Die is all about frenetic arcade action, where hordes of monsters run down narrow paths to be dispatched by the dozen by your traps and your crossbow. Their routes are predictable and easily-controlled, and in most levels you can place yourself at a choke-point or two to maximise the War Mage’s considerable combat abilities. By contrast Sang-Froid is a much slower, more cerebral game for four reasons:

1)      Each day of Sang-Froid takes place on the same map, which occasionally expands to cover more territory as you hit certain milestones in the campaign, and this map is far more open than you’d expect from your usual tower defence game. There are stands of trees which serve to funnel the monsters somewhat, but in general Sang-Froid takes the dual problems of mobility and presence to an extreme: you cannot cover the entire map with traps and you can’t be everywhere at once, so you have to place traps very carefully in order to slow the monsters down and give yourself time to respond to an attack.

2)      Monsters can appear from just about anywhere. You get to see where they’re coming from in advance and which building they’ll be targeting, and the game will even tell you how their route will change in response to paths you’ve closed with walls of fire, but their spawn points will invariably be split up over the entire map. This exacerbates the mobility and presence challenges mentioned in point 1) as it’s not uncommon for monsters to spawn in very close proximity to the building they’re going to attack, necessitating good trap placement to either kill them or slow them down enough so that you have enough time to get over there.

3)       There aren’t many monsters in Sang-Froid. It’s rare that you’ll find yourself fighting more than fifteen in a single night, and those fifteen will be split up into multiple waves; one spawn point will often spawn just a single monster  and that’s it. However because those monsters are werewolves they are commensurately tough, and if you haven’t done your homework and given yourself some sort of advantage – a bonfire to increase their Fear Factor and make them back off, blessing your weapons so that the werewolves’ innate resistance to conventional weapons no longer applies, using your gun to shoot a hanging net and drop heavy rocks on them – then it can take a very long time to put down even a single werewolf. Meanwhile other monsters are wrecking all of your buildings, and if you lose a single building you lose the level outright.

4)      As previously stated your character is basically one of two degrees of wheezy old man. He can’t run for long without getting tired. He can’t swing his axe more than three or four times without having to catch his breath. A single werewolf can easily tear his head off if you’re not careful, and getting to far away buildings quickly is out of the question unless you’ve set up watchtowers and ziplines in advance.

So Sang-Froid isn’t a question of slapping down a ton of traps, chuckling as the idiot monsters run into them and then going to town on the survivors with your mighty werewolf slayer. For one thing you only get a fixed amount of action points to set traps with per day, and that amount isn’t enough to let you place traps at more than three or four chokepoints at once. This means you can’t rely solely on traps to kill the monsters for you — especially since the most efficient ones also have a money cost attached, and money is a very precious resource in Sang-Froid. In the main the traps exist to slow, weaken and maim monsters to the point where you can fight them without being overwhelmed by their numbers or their sheer power, and this will only happen if you put them down in an intelligent way. In fact the planning stages of Sang-Froid remind me very heavily of the first three Rainbow Six games; just as in Rainbow Six the planning stage is where the outcome of the level is actually determined. You can make things run a little bit smoother by whooshing around on ziplines and doing well in combat, but if you haven’t done well in your trap placement you’re going to die, period.

The game’s heavy reliance on pre-placed traps to give you an advantage in fights is emphasised by two incredibly good mechanics that are particularly appropriate for a werewolf game: detection and fear factor. Detection functions much as you’d expect – if the monsters can see you they’ll come for you no matter what, and if you make a noise by shouting or firing your gun any monster nearby will move to that spot as quickly as possible in an attempt to find you – but with the additional complication of your scent being carried towards the monsters on the wind. This can often be awkward if the wind is blowing in an inconvenient direction, but it also allows you to bait monsters onto traps and keep them running after you and not your buildings.  Meanwhile fear factor is a numerical indicator of how intimidated the monsters are by your presence. If the fear factor of the monsters (which slowly ticks up over time and which is boosted by the presence of additional monsters) is less than the fear factor of your character they’ll circle you menacingly but they won’t attack. As things initially stand the fear factor of the monsters is automatically higher than yours, but you can temporarily give your fear factor a boost by shouting or by standing next to a lit bonfire. This gets them to back off and gives you some breathing room to recover stamina and reload your gun, and if you’re going to be doing any fighting at all it’s essential to put a bonfire down in the area where you think it’s going to happen in order to give yourself the best odds of surviving it.

There are other preparations you can make. Shortly after the game begins you get access to the town of Wolvesvale¹ which contains a selection of shops and amenities where you can buy items that give temporary or permanent bonuses to your character. These range from better weapons (and believe me you need them, as the starting weapons are absolutely miserable for anything that isn’t a common-or-garden wolf)  to bottles of alcohol that essentially act as powerup items, to wolfskin clothes that give passive damage reduction and speed bonuses. There’s also a convent where you can bless your bullets and your axe so that you can do the full amount of damage to werewolves instead of having to see that “Resistant!” message pop up every time you whack them. All these things (with the exception of alcohol) are incredibly expensive, however, and the traps are already a drain on your meagre supply of cash gained from selling wolfskin pelts. You can get more by spending action points to chop and sell wood instead of putting down traps, which creates an interesting choice between trapping a level properly or skimping a bit in the hope that you can scrape through the level with a bit of extra money; however I never felt like I had enough money to buy everything I needed, which is usually a sign that a game is doing something right.

Still, you can spend six dollars and the axe and an additional dollar on the blessing (this is more money than you will ever have at any point during the game) and it still won’t be the last word in melee combat². There are seven or eight different types of monster in Sang-Froid, split into two camps: vulnerable to holy weapons, and vulnerable to silver weapons. You can’t get silver weapons blessed because they come from an Indian camp and the nuns at the convent are cultural supremacists or something, so missions that feature both monster camps force the player to make yet another tough decision about which type of weapon they’re going to take. Whichever you choose there’s going to be monsters in the level who are resistant to it, and who you’re going to have to rely on the traps to eliminate. Again, it all comes back to the game hinging on decisions you make during the planning stage.

I really like Sang-Froid as a game. It’s an excellently-designed piece of tower defence action with several unique mechanics that mesh together very well. I’ve had a lot of fun playing it. Unfortunately – as with all my reviews – I’ve saved all the bad parts of the game for the final two paragraphs, and in Sang-Froid’s case these are literally everything that isn’t the game. When I said it looked like a title from 1999 I wasn’t kidding; it’s locked at some bizarre screen resolution with no option to change it and I haven’t seen a running animation quite as bad as Jack’s since I played Anachronox back in 2001. Still, I wouldn’t hold these low-tech visuals against Sang-Froid except that the developers insist on using them to tell an absolutely godawful story that constantly intruded on and interrupted my attempts to actually play the game. Every time you start a new level the game will show you a cutscene where some characters spout a couple of lines of hackneyed, poorly-constructed dialogue. The voice-acting is abysmal and mostly sounds like the friends and family of the development team, and pressing Escape to quit this cutscene will likely simply start the next cutscene; there have been levels where I’ve had to hammer the escape button three or four times to get back to the planning stage. Then it asks you if you want to watch a tutorial video (these are useful, but I would have appreciated some sort of metric inside the game that tracked whether or not they had been viewed yet and then relegated them to the Tutorials option in the main menu). Then when you’re done with your planning and start the night, you get another cutscene. There are cutscenes in the middle of missions. Cutscenes at the end of missions. Command and Conquer has less cutscenes than Sang-Froid. Metal Gear Solid has less cutscenes than Sang-Froid, for crying out loud; their total lack of quality combined with their sheer abundance actively put me off playing the game.

What I don’t understand about this is that it’s actually quite easy to tell an effective story in a game, even with next to no budget for the visuals. Follow Waking Mars’ example: commission a few high-quality character portraits that don’t make the viewer retch at their sheer ugliness and tell the story purely through text³, devoting the time and effort you would have spent doing voice-acting on making sure that text is well-written. The instant one of the participants opens their mouth and delivers a line that sounds like it was recorded by the lead designer’s bored grandpa it’s game over for your story, so why would you open yourself up to the risk? Minimalism is fine in an indie game like this one; more than fine, in fact, as Sang-Froid demonstrates that attempting to ape the high-budget multimedia experiences from bigger developers merely results in a disastrous mess. Sang-Froid illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of indie developers; they can develop an interesting and unique spin on a concept that you just wouldn’t see from even the more mainstream indies, as they’ve done here, but they also have a tendency to overreach and try to implement game features that they don’t have the resources to execute properly. Or at all.

Anyway, I wish I could say it was easy to tune the cutscenes out; unfortunately it’s the exact opposite and counts as a significant black mark in Sang-Froid’s ledger. It’s pretty much the only one, though. Sang-Froid won’t appeal to everyone, I think, but if you like your tower defence a little bit slower-paced and far more thinky than we’re used to the chances are you’ll get along with it very well. Oh, and depending on your musical predilections it also has one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in the last year, full of folksy colonial-era music that fits both the theme and the game like a glove, and very pleasant icing on a delectable wolf-shaped strategy cake.

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I’m struggling to come up with something to say about Toy Soldiers. It’s a game that almost goes out of its way not to elicit any emotions from the player, which is kind of odd given its choice of World War I as a setting. World War I is not a conflict often visited by games, and this is probably because it’s difficult to design a game set amidst the stark horror of the trench warfare in no-man’s land when WW1’s younger, more attractive sibling is right there in the sunny Normandy bocage. There’s little strategy to human wave attacks and no real latitude for the ludicrous acts of personal heroism that FPSes are so enamoured with, and so the only thing you can really do with a World War I setting is make a tower defence game out of it.

This is exactly what Toy Soldiers does, and it sidesteps the potential moral issue of reducing the tragic mass slaughters of the First World War to a leisure activity where you try to mow down as many Germans as possible by setting everything inside a toy box. As the name implies, all those German soldiers dying in futile mass charges against your defences are toy soldiers. Your turrets are toys, manned by toy soldiers. The tanks and planes on both sides are toys. When you kill an enemy soldier he explodes into cogs and springs rather than limbs and organs, thus neatly removing the “Oh the humanity!” problem that might have occurred otherwise. However, while this decision does have other upsides — the mismatch of scale between different toys allows the developers to insert some truly outsize bosses — I feel that ultimately it detracts from the game by making everything rather… unreal? It’s unreal anyway, of course, what with being a videogame and all, but the stiff, stilted toy animations do little to imbue these tiny men running across the mud-churned wasteland with any sense of liveliness, and it robs the game of any real impact that it might have had.

I keep coming back to this word when describing a lot of games, but as a result of this Toy Soldiers ends up being rather sterile. World War I is quite a depressing setting at the best of time, but by insulating the player from it in this way Toy Soldiers ends up feeling rather distant and remote, like a game that isn’t really invested in entertaining me and is only doing so grudgingly and half-heartedly. I mean, Toy Soldiers looks excellent by tower defence game standards, but it’s a cold, cold kind of beauty like an Antarctic mountain range – nice to look at, but you wouldn’t want to go there. This whole isolated quality that permeates the game ensured that it elicited no emotional response from me whatsoever. Sure, I wasn’t horrified at the graphic depiction of gas attack in the trenches, but I wasn’t having any fun either.

Toy Soldiers isn’t helped by the rather stupid decision to severely limit the number of places where you can site your turrets. There’s no route manipulation here, and while there are a few maps where the enemy attacks from different directions the fact that they all have to be defended at once means these maps just give you more to deal with at once. Toy Soldiers is therefore a question of what you put down rather than where you put it, and since there’s maybe half a dozen turret types – none of which interact in any way – there’s very little strategy to it. It doesn’t help that each map is themed, either – here’s the airplane map! And the tank map! Remember to build your anti-air and anti-tank turrets! And then do… what, exactly?

Toy Soldiers at least makes an effort here with its direct control mechanic. At any time you can take over one of your turrets and start shooting at the Germans yourself for some bonus cash. This is undeniably effective, but I get the impression that the accuracy of the AI-controlled turrets has been sabotaged in order to make it necessary for you to do this, at least judging from the way they’d repeatedly fire several metres to the right or left of the giant enemy tank but never in the middle. This is frustrating to watch, to say the least; you have the correct turrets set up to kill the particular enemy type that’s charging your defences but they refuse to hit it, and unless you take control of one yourself it’ll barrel right through and into your base. It turns what could have been a fun little bonus and a way of releasing a little steam into a tedious necessity; it’s far less fun if you have to do it.

The same is true of the vehicles. Doing strafing runs on charging infantry in your Sopwith Camel is somewhat exhilarating, but any time you get in a tank you’re reduced to being just a mobile turret because there’s nothing you can really do here except kill the attacking waves. There are enemy turrets scattered around that give you a nominal reason to move forward; sadly, the unlimited ammo means you basically just hold the fire button down until everything dies.

And that’s it, really. Toy Soldiers isn’t a tower defence game as such, it’s more like a turret defence game in the vein of Incoming and that other game where you’re mowing down the Allies as they storm theNormandy beaches. Given that Incoming exhausted the possibilities of this genre in the space of precisely one game, and that Incoming had much prettier explosions despite being fifteen years older, it doesn’t reflect fantastically on Toy Soldiers’ potential for entertainment. I bought it because it was £3 and a game set in the First World War and I don’t see many of those. After playing Toy Soldiers I’m starting to understand why.

The post Thoughts: Toy Soldiers. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

A slight scheduling snafu means today’s article isn’t quite ready yet, so I’m swapping it with Tuesday’s. Tune in tomorrow if you want to read science!

This isn’t really a genuine review of Defender’s Quest. A genuine review would outline all – or at least most of – the specific reasons why you personally should or should not buy the game. However, the existence of this excellent browser-based demo makes a genuine review of Defender’s Quest entirely pointless. (Go ahead! Play it! It’ll even let you export your demo save to the full game if you end up liking it so much that you buy it!) Instead, I’m going to spend this column space writing about why I personally like Defender’s Quest, and why it is an outstanding example of – not to mention an excellent take on – the tower defence genre.

Yes, it’s another tower defence game. It seems that you can’t move in gaming circles these days without tripping over one of the bloody things every couple of steps. Waves of enemies spawn at one end of the map, and your job is to place your “towers” in a such a way that they all die before getting to the thing you’re trying to defend at the other end of the map. Towers can be upgraded to do more damage, enemies get gradually more powerful and more numerous as the map goes on, yadda yadda yadda. So far, so conventional.

But Defender’s Quest is anything but conventional. You see, you don’t actually place towers as such. You place people; people who are based off of typical fantasy RPG tropes – fighter, archer, knight, healer and so on. They’re immobile and they have a limited range so they have the same basic functionality as towers, but they differ from towers in one important respect: every character you place is unique, with its own separately-tracked experience gain and skill tree which they level up just like an RPG character. They can also be fully customised in terms of name and clothing colour so that you can easily tell your six tiny sprite-berserkers apart in the heat of the moment.

This lets Defender’s Quest do some very, very neat things. There’s six character classes and you can have six of each, and every class fills a particular defensive niche that makes it effective against a particular bad guy. The enemy waves are pseudo-randomly generated and can have any combination of the following qualities: basic, fast, fighting, armoured, dark, ranged, water-crossing, spawn. Berserkers have a high damage output that hits many baddies at once but are hampered by a short range, so they’re best against large groups of weak enemies that can be dispatched quickly, and worst against armoured and fast enemies. To kill armoured monsters you first have to hit them with a knight’s armour-piercing attacks; this permanently destroys a creature’s armour so that other characters further down the line have a chance of damaging it when it gets to them. Fast enemies need to be countered with the ice mage’s slowing attacks; dark enemies with the healer’s Holy Light and Ether Flash spells. Rangers are a jack-of-all-trades – they do a little bit of armour piercing, have rapid attacks and a long range, but don’t do that much damage – so their job is to supplement the other fighters by taking out the odd baddie that slips through the defences and wearing the rest down by constant attrition.

All the units you can place are specialised to fulfil a specific role, therefore. However, the skill trees and rudimentary progression the RPG mechanic adds to the game allows some specialisation within that specialisation. You can upgrade a berserker to attack more quickly, but that’ll mean neglecting his extra regeneration ability – which is important when berserkers can’t wear armour. Healers can be levelled to the point where they provide a temporary damage boost to all nearby characters; rangers get the aforementioned armour piercing as well as a poisoning effect for extra damage over time, and dragons get the appropriately-named “NOM” ability which lets them instantly kill baddies who have dropped below a certain level of health.

It’s very well thought out, and means unit placement in Defender’s Quest requires a little more thought than your average tower defence game. This is compounded by the way the RPG mechanic allows the developers to approach in-battle unit upgrades. Usually it’s a case of upgrade = more powerful/quicker attack, which is a somewhat boring if easy-to-understand way of doing it. In Defender’s Quest, since the individual units are all upgrading anyway thanks to the levelling they do in the metagame something a little different is called for. A basic level one unit will have access to just one attack which hits a single target quickly. As they level in the metagame, though, they get access to additional attacks which recharge slowly, but which hit more people for more damage than their regular attack. These will be locked off when the unit is first placed on the map, but once some mana is invested in “boosting” the unit to level 2 they’re able to use a second attack. Level 3 enables a third attack, level 4 a fourth attack and so on, and the crucial thing here is that all these attacks recharge independently; a level 5 berserker will still be hitting with his basic attack at the same rate as level 1 berserker, but he’ll also be laying down the pain with four additional attacks as well.

This makes the damage difference between a basic level 1 unit and a unit boosted to the maximum level 5 far more dramatic than it would be otherwise. In fact the cost to upgrade a unit even once will be several times the amount you pay to put it on the map in the first place; this high price reflects the way they exponentially improve in effectiveness with each additional upgrade level. And thus Defender’s Quest isn’t so much a question of scraping together money to buy new towers – you could quite easily put down every single unit you owned with your starting cash if you wanted, although you’d then go on to lose the map because they’d all be rubbish – but instead it’s all about what you upgrade where and when.

This and the different varieties of enemy that can be encountered are enough to make Defender’s Quest a Good Game, but it goes further than that by adding abilities for the player to use that are actually useful (indeed, a well-timed Frenzy can make or break a level), excellent music and a plot that is, if not exactly stellar in quality, at least serviceable. I definitely appreciate that they made the effort. Best of all is that the developers have bent over backwards to make the game accessible to as broad a range of players as possible. Can’t do a level? Go back and get some experience by trying an earlier one on a harder difficulty setting. Aren’t getting enough experience? Whack experience gain up via the game options. Don’t want to sit through a cutscene? Press the skip button. There’s an amount of customisability here that I really respect; it’s a game that wants you to play it the way you want to without feeling like you’re copping out.

If Defender’s Quest has a flaw – and I am kind of nitpicking here – it is that the presence of the RPG mechanic means that the developers haven’t had to think so much about balancing their difficulty settings – after all, no matter how hard a level is you’ll eventually become strong enough to beat it, so they obviously felt it was appropriate to stick some really, really vicious ones in there. Beating the game on Advanced requires you to – hnngh – actively grind experience in the single Endless level, while I’ve yet to finish it on Expert despite being quite sickeningly overlevelled at this point. If you haven’t got enough experience to finish a level then all the tactical placement in the world won’t carry you through it. I’m not sure I particularly agree with this approach to difficulty, but then I’m not sure how else they could have done it. The base difficulty level is at least appropriately paced as long as you don’t obsess over getting a perfect rating on your first runthrough, so while I don’t really like it I can at least live with it.

2012 seems to be the Year of the Indie Games for me. The number of worthwhile triple-A releases on the horizon is laughably small (it currently stands at four barring any surprise announcements) but given the generally dire quality of most of the games I bought last year indie games taking up the slack might be no bad thing, especially if they’re all as good as Defender’s Quest. It’s probably not the best one I’ll play this year – it lacks the brainbox genius of something like SpaceChem – but it is extremely well designed and a pure pleasure to play. And even if nothing else is released this year which surpasses it, Defender’s Quest at least ensures that I’ll remember 2012 for something.

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Just one thing before we start:

GORG! AAAAAAAHHH! HE IS THE UNSTOPPABLE!

Right, now that’s out of my system we can get on with the review.

Unstoppable Gorg is a puzzler-cum-tower defence game with an awesomely cheesy retro 1950s sci-fi flavour. I put the puzzler part of the descriptor first because that’s what Unstoppable Gorg is, primarily. All tower defence games have some sort of puzzle element to them, but they’re distinguished from true puzzlers in that they usually give you the freedom to work towards your own solution, Gorg on the other hand can best be described as a puzzle game with some light tower defence elements.

How did this happen? It’s down to Unstoppable Gorg’s main gameplay conceit, which is that it is set in space. Other tower defence games give you vast swathes of land upon which you can plan and build your defences. In Gorg, there is no land. All the game gives you are a few hotspots on a series of orbital rings surrounding whatever you’re trying to keep the aliens away from. Consequently, missions where you’re able to build more than five or six offensive towers are incredibly rare.

This robs Gorg of what little free-form nature it might have carried over from its tower defence heritage. Instead of trying to find a rough combination of towers which works, you’re trying to find the single tower which will crack a mission wide open as well as figuring out when exactly to build it. And the game doesn’t allow any room for error, either; given the way resource gathering is set up you often only have enough money to build/upgrade a couple of types of tower when a certain wave turns up, and if you choose poorly you can kiss goodbye to your planet/spaceship/space station. I very much got the impression that there was only one “correct” solution to a level, and that if I deviated from this solution even slightly the game would punish me with failure.

On the whole this isn’t a particularly promising recipe for fun, but Gorg tries its best. Since you’re building satellites instead of towers you can rotate individual orbital rings to change the positions of satellites at any time. Tracking an incoming wave with a powerful turret by manually moving it round the station is one of the hallmarks of the later missions. It’s also this more than anything else that makes it resemble a puzzler, as other satellites you’ve put down on the same ring will also be moved, often screwing up your carefully-planned defences.  Not only do you have to place your turrets in the right places to intercept an incoming wave, but you also have to place them in such a way that moving one of them won’t leave you open somewhere else

This makes Unstoppable Gorg far more trial-and-error-y than other games of its type, and while the orbital rings and the ability to move them are what distinguishes Gorg from its competitors gameplay-wise I think they end up hurting the game more than they help it. For example, there’s about eighteen types of satellite in the game, roughly half of which never get used because there is so little margin for error you can’t afford to. Some of these are just plain useless, like the sweeper and the gas missile. Others are the “support” satellites that would otherwise form the lynchpin of a successful defence – the slow turret, the tripwire turret, the turret that boosts all other turrets in range – and in no situation is it ever worth taking one of these over something with the capacity to shoot back at the aliens. And believe me, you need to shoot back. You want as much direct firepower as possible firing as continuously as possible because many of the alien ships are insanely hard to kill even for the weapons they’re supposed to be weak to.

Unstoppable Gorg features three alien races. The Sunbots are weak to energy weapons but strong against physical damage. The Brain Riders are strong against energy weapons but weak against physical damage. And then there’s the middle-of-the-road Gorg… people, who are not particularly strong or weak against anything.  This is supposed to induce the player to construct a cunning defence network that consists of both types of damage in order to efficiently dispose of each alien race, but since building space is at a premium – and effective building space even more so given the way the rings are set up – and as mentioned the player is often constrained in what they can build at any particular point in the mission by their budget, it’s far more cost-effective to have multiple turrets that can hurt every alien race instead of one or two specific counter-turrets for each. What I would like to have done was spam as many missile launchers as possible since those were the only weapon that was truly effective against all ship types, but often I simply couldn’t afford to do this and had to slum it with something cheaper and worserer.

I’m not sure if this is good design or bad design in the context of what Gorg ended up being. Sure, it prevented me from using the same strategy to win every map, but on the other hand Gorg already does enough to tie the player’s hands. Having to deal with the currency restriction on top of everything else was immensely frustrating at times, and it’s probably the major factor in my saying Gorg only has one correct solution per level – when a certain wave arrives, you have X amount of money that has to be spent on Y turret placed in Z spot or else you will fail the level, and the game consists of trying to find Y and Z for each successive wave. This is reasonably engaging, but it’s nowhere near the meaty strategic experience tower defence is supposed to offer because there’s no flexibility.

So Gorg is perhaps not that great a game. It is solid, it is respectable, but I would definitely hesitate before calling it good. Which is sad, because the thing I enjoyed most about Unstoppable Gorg had sod all to do with the game itself; the entire thing is packaged in this 1950s Flash Gordon-esque box, complete with cutscenes where wobbly saucers suspended from clearly-visible wires assault Earth ships shaped like the classic Flash Gordon rocket with a sparkler jammed up its ass. This did much to endear Gorg to me; I laughed out loud when Radiant Sunbeem first popped up on my screen – a reaction rarely induced by anything – while the frequent news reports contain plentiful treats for those like me who are fans of reading the small print of fake TV newspapers (some of them are actually quite topical considering what this blog has talked about in the past). There’s a constantly-palpable love for the period and the style on display throughout; it’s something that developers often bang on about all the time but which rarely ever comes through in a game after the publishers and marketers are done with it. Its presence makes the game enjoyable in spite of its many, many flaws, and I can’t help but think it deserved a better vessel than the ultimate mediocrity that is Unstoppable Gorg.

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