Cheap PC Gaming: Unstoppable Gorg!

Aliens. Despite being destroyed over and over again, they just keep coming back to get all up in our business. If the Unstoppable Gorg! is anything to go by, their latest militaristic innovation is badly thought out; clearly highlighting attack routes that are just begging for stationary weaponry to be placed alongside. That’s right, UG is a tower defence game but it’s not just any tower defence game – it’s a tower defence game with a twist. Quite literally, in fact.

Allow me to explain. In UG, you place your towers into set slots on an orbital ring around whatever it is you are defending. You’re able to rotate this orbital ring and, therefore, move the towers. The Gorg will descend upon your base in a route that inexplicably winds and twists (apparently they don’t believe in or haven’t discovered straight lines), allowing you to place large guns to take them out. In the next wave they’ll likely take a different route, so you can rotate your multitude of orbital rings to get the towers you’ve already placed into a more advantageous spot.

[drop]So yes, that’s moving towers in a tower defence game. It’s revolutionary and it will wind you up. UG starts off simply enough, taking you through the customary tutorial. However, get a few missions in and you’ll realise that Unstoppable Gorg! is surpringly hard. It gets hectic and overwhelming rather quickly as multiple routes are plotted on your screen, bringing with them lines of Gorg trying to slip through your defenses. You quickly realise you just don’t have enough money, towers or hands to cope with the invasion, completely missing that third line of Gorg over there. You know the one I mean, it’s the one that’s currently destroying your base. Sorry, the one that destroyed your base. Opps.

Taking action for me consisted of making more energy so I could place and upgrade more weaponry, which means I needed more solar generators. These are placed in slots on orbital rings just like your towers are. When you rotate the ring, the solar generators rotate just like the towers do, so there’s a good chance that your perfectly positioned vulcan cannon has resulted in your energy source rotating its way into the line of fire. It’s already becoming tricky before you even mention your research labs, which, well, research things throughout a level. If you’ve reached the right amount of research during a level you unlock a point to spend on your towers, enabling you to buy an upgrade in-game.

As you can tell it all gets pretty complicated, and that’s without even going into the many different types of alien ships. From fast, weaponless ones to big, bullet-soaking, laser-blasting UFOs, they’re all difficult in their own ways, and once they reach your base they’ll do different things. Some will abduct people and try to escape (they can still be destroyed as they fly off), whilst others will orbit at close range, chipping away at your base constantly damage until you manage to take it out. Either way, they’ll be taking your health points and they’re gone that’s pretty much it.

[drop2]All of this is presented in the style of a 1950s sci-fi b-movie, with a healthy sense of humour throughout. From the utterly perfect (and surprisingly convincing) black and white movies outlining the story between career missions to the wires the UFOs on the main menu are dangling from the whole experience is well polished and consistent. It’s an excellent aesthetic that works very well and, whilst it isn’t exactly a graphical powerhouse, it certainly doesn’t look bad.

In addition to the previously mentioned Career mode you also get two others. Challenge mode lets you play career mode levels you’ve previously completed with additional difficulties, such as less start money or certain orbital rings being locked for movement, whilst Arcade mode is a survival mode in which you must survive as long as you can against waves of enemies, with energy for upgrading and building given to you at the end of each wave. There are 21 levels in Career mode, each of which has a more difficult variation in Challenge mode and 4 different difficulty settings, plus there’s Survival mode, too.

Unstoppable Gorg! is a steal at £6.99 from Steam and £6.95 from GamersGate. If you’re not sold yet take a look at the trailer below.