Unstoppable Gorg PC Review

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This week we have another entry to the Tower Defence Genre, which in it’s self is full of a lot of great titles, from the recent Dungeon Defenders, to various flash games, facebook games and mods for Warcraft, there are a lot to choose from, yet even amongst the mass of titles already available and the many clones/ripoffs of most of the popular ones, Unstoppable Gorg manages to stand out from the crowd.

The game has a very slick style, taking inspiration from 1950’s sci-fi when it comes to graphics, sound effects, spacey music and right down to it’s fantastic little black and white videos that playout through it’s story mode, akin to a B-Movie news reel.

The story is laid out in a typical space invasion style, aliens are coming to destroy earth, your satellites, the moon, your day, take your pick.  They come in their hundreds with flying saucers, mother-ships and even just as flying brains to death ray and zap your defences to pieces, forever descending down towards your planet or space station as you try to fend them off through the story modes 21 levels, each more intense and complex than the last.

The story mode offers you four levels of difficulty, although I must admit I’m terrible at tower defence games, so I found my self having to switch to easy mode for a few of the levels, as I definitely got invaded on the harder difficulties, but at least if your looking for a challenge the game does offer you that option.  After completion of levels you also unlock their counter part challenge variant in the games challenges mode, allowing you to replay each level with a few extra goals in mind to test your metal.

As you progress you unlock more defences, as well as upgrade tokens to increase fire power, rates of fire, health and range.  by the time you’ve unlocked a few of the satellites, you’ll have to pick which ones you want for each mission as most of the levels have restrictions on how many variants you can use, not to mention you always have a limited number of spaces you can place satellites.

You start off by building a reactor, which gains you power to build more defences, then you can either place a research satellite, which earns you more upgrade slots or just go for it and deploy some some guns.  Once placed you can rotate the orbit of each satellite around the level, enemies will be descending on you from various angles from their motherships, meaning you have to keep actively rotating your defences to place them within firing range or in some cases even moving them out of harms way as things like your reactors and repair satellites cannot defend them selves from the incoming hordes and when you have 12 satellites and 100 enemies to deal with this can be rather chaotic, but definitely a lot of fun.

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Manage to succeed though and you will be rewarded with medals for you achievements and score on the mission, which aren’t always easy to earn, but it does keep you coming back to levels to try different combinations of satellites to improve your score and medals time and time again, it’s just a shame the game has no scoreboards for you to compete against friends.

The game also has a fantastic Arcade mode, where you’ll have to hold your ground against endless waves of aliens with the purpose of racking up as big a score as possible before you’re finally over run.  No need to worry about power stations this time either, credits flow in slowly allowing you to rebuild and expand as the waves progress.

Expect arcade mode to get chaotic after the first 10 or so waves, your enemies really do start to come in swarms of ever increasing difficulty, so if your not ready, you can expect to fail pretty quickly, but with a solid setup I managed to keep playing one game for well over half an hour before I decided to just quit and take a break.

The presentation is spot on and the extra details they added with the introduction movies and such a wide choice of weapons and defences really make this game stand out, it shows that the developers really put in the extra effort to make this look and feel as good as it does, ok it doesn’t have ground breaking graphics, but most any pc should have little trouble running this game and it’s not exactly hard on the eyes.

Unstoppable Gorg was Created by Futuremark, the very same company that makes 3DMark and various other benchmark software and is available on Steam for £6.99 which for the level of content on offer is an absolute bargain.  Plenty of re-playability is on offer and it’s one of the finest indie tower defence games around.  Given I’m not a massive fan of the genre, it really took me by surprise how much fun this game was.

So if your looking for either a new tower defence title to sink your teeth into or just a coffee break title that you can tab back to when the boss is out the office, then I highly recommend this game, which is why we’ve given it our gamers choice award this week.

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