Unstoppable Gorg Review

Futuremark Games Studio have returned with a rather interesting title. Unstoppable Gorg, a 1950's sci-fi b-movie inspired tower defense title that tries to put a spin on the genre and works rather well.

From the word go you realise that Unstoppable Gorg is saturated with that certain b-movie cheese which is actually quite warming and gives the game a level of appealing charm that grows on you, encouraging you to play more. In the stylings of the crappy movies and 50's American commercials they used to play on Sumo TV at 3 AM when you came in from an arduous night out, you're greeted with newsreels at the beginning of every mission informing you of the current happenings.

You'll occasionally receive broadcasts from one of the games antagonists, starting with King Gorg himself vowing to eradicate our species from the face of the universe!

Now this is not your standard plant tower in specific place of the maze to win, in fact just forget most of what you've learned in other tower defense games as you'll have to learn new mechanics and employ different strategies while making real time actions in moving your towers to defeat the waves of enemies.

That's right, move your towers, the unique element of this game is that your base is central to the action of the level. You then have a number of orbital rings with a number of placement slots on said rings, you may rotate this orbital rings to spin your towers around to either bring an offensive tower into play; or rotate your resource generator or research stations out of harms way.

The enemies can also shoot back at your towers so you'll have to budget in repair costs just to add an additional layer of strategy to an already chaotic battle plan you may have in your minds eye. The enemies will normally spawn from the mothership on the level, these will follow a visible green path towards the centralized base.

However the craziness does not end here, some levels will also have floating debris or asteroids to contend with, so get rotating the towers to blow these out of the cosmos. In the early stages you'll find that just sticking with the cheap towers while trying to stack on resource gatherers are your only viable option, and trying to rinse out the most use of your single vulcan cannon by dragging it along the path of the enemies where possible is your bread and butter starting strategy due to limited funds.

You have your standard assortment of towers ranging from weak rapid fire machine guns, slow firing cannons, long range missiles and other armaments to help you defeat the Gorg or other threats. You may also upgrade these towers to increase their abilities but only after you've researched tokens in the previous level.

At the start of each level you may select which towers you will utilise on that particular map while allocating the research tokens you've learned on certain towers so you may upgrade them during combat. Everything is linked together to create a very challenging game which is more than capable to stand out from the crowd with ease.

At the end of each level you're awarded medals based upon the outcome of the battle, so making sure your base takes no damage, losing no towers and researching that upgrade token in the battle is usually the key to maximising the medal count for that level. Unfortunately it's not that simple unless you just slap the game on easy and faceroll to victory, you will fail at some point on a level due to not picking the right tower at the right time or you couldn't rotate a cannon to take out an asteroid quick enough and it's smacked into the base.

Thankfully you may replay any level whenever you feel like and concentrate on the medals you have missed, also you'll be replaying levels quite a lot, even for the hardened TD veterans out there. As the game progresses you will inevitably come across mixed race encounters forcing you to adapt on the fly with a mix of weaponry to overcome their weaknesses.

If you feel like you're up to increasing the difficulty after learning the patterns of the level, then feel free to choose one of the four available going from easy to unstoppable; and believe me there are times you actually feel these buggers are unstoppable. Each level you unlock also opens these difficulties up in the other two game modes available; Challenge and Arcade.

Challenge mode will have certain modifiers applied to that level such as reduced funds from resource gatherers, or the inner orbital ring is constantly rotating and you may not have any control over that whatsoever. Arcade mode removes the need for resource gathering and research towers, leaving you with the business end of the selection; pushing wave after wave of enemies to you this is simply survive as long as possible and aim for the high score.

Resources are only gained by killing enemies and completing waves so make sure you budget accordingly as you will quickly find that you don't have the tools for the task.

Once you get the hang of the game though, you're compelled to come back time and time again, not only for the cheesy sci-fi theatricals this title showers over you; but also for the very, very challenging gameplay that the team at Futuremark Games Studio have created for us. Clearly a winner for anyone that enjoys a good tower defense romp.