At the farthest reaches of the Solar System scientists have discovered a mysterious tenth planet! The legendary Planet X! But unfortunately it turns out to be inhabited by the terrible Gorg, hell bent on eradicating the human race with the aid of flying brain monsters living on Jupiter. Sound like a plot from a cheesy 50’s B-movie? Good, because that’s largely the inspiration behind Unstoppable Gorg from Futuremark Games Studio.
I, for one, welcome our new tinfoil overlords
A lot of narrative is presented to you in the format of old cinema newsreels and robots frequently look like cardboard boxes or toasters with eyeballs. UFOs hang very obviously from fishing wire. Terrible special effects abound. If that sounds like something you’d watch over a takeaway pizza with a few cans of beer, this game might just be for you.
At it’s core, Unstoppable Gorg is a variant of the now (in my humble opinion) slightly stale genre of Tower Defence. A few hundred creeps are on their way to your base and you must build armed towers to eradicate them before too many get there. But wait, there’s a twist! Your ‘towers’ here are orbital satellites around the planet you have been tasked with defending. You’ll get a few different orbital rings at different radii and each has a few pre-set locations to build at. However, the entire ring can be rotated about the planet to reposition your satellites. In most tower defence games, strategy usually consists of forcing the creeps to take the longest path by blocking their routes and countering their individual weaknesses. In Unstoppable Gorg, you’ll find yourself having to deal with continually moving all your units to deal with your enemies constantly changing angles of attack. One creep slipped you by? Move your orbit to chase it down, but at the cost of opening up your defence elsewhere. It makes for a much faster paced game; very rarely is the occasion you’ll find yourself holding down fast-forward to make things happen.
Oh no! They got K9!
Unstoppable Gorg still has a lot of rock-paper-scissors type stuff going on: brains are weak to physical damage and resistant to energy weapons and other enemies have their own strengths and weaknesses so you’ll need a well balanced armament to counter them, especially if they team up on you. Tips learned from Plants vs Zombies seem to be relevant, too. That is to say, generate as many resources as possible because then you can buy the big guns fast. That’s actually pretty difficult early on and it does make some of the early levels a little more challenging than some of the later ones, but with practice, patience and persistence you’ll overcome most of your difficulties in this game.
Visit sunny Mercury!
The soundtrack isn’t extensive, nor is it the kind of thing that’s catchy enough to have you singing it days later. Nonetheless, it fits the cheesy sci-fi bill extremely well and will certainly have you grinning like a loon alongside the flying brains.
If, like me, you love finding the absolute worst films available just for a good laugh, and if you’re also not entirely sick yet of building towers to fend off creeps determined to march along a predetermined path until either they run out of guys or you don’t defend hard enough, then you should probably check out Unstoppable Gorg. If it had been the same old format I might not have enjoyed it quite so much, but the orbital format provides a fresh spin (gettit?) on the genre that stands it out from the crowd.
Unstoppable Gorg is available on Steam for both PC and Mac, iPad, and is coming soon to XBLA.
GLHF,
~Meroka
