Read and watch the full review of X-Morph Defense[playfrugal.com]

Use your alien shapeshifting technology to defend your resource harvesting cores against human military assault in locations all over Earth in X-Morph Defense.

Aliens have traveled to Earth in search of resources to harvest. Unfortunately, they didn’t expect intelligent life to be there trying to stop them. X-Morph Defense turns the tables on the “aliens bad, humans good” trope and puts you at the helm of a shapeshifting alien craft to defend your harvesting cores.

“X-Morph” is the nickname humans gave to you because, not only can your craft change shape (and abilities) at will, but your towers can transform and be moved in the middle of battle as well as between attack waves.

In a typical tower defense game, you set the turrets along the path you expect attackers to use, and then you wait to see how your strategy plays out. You can usually upgrade your turrets to more powerful versions of themselves as the battle progresses, but that’s about it. Unfortunately for those unfortunate humans, you can do much more.

You pilot a craft which can transform instantly from wielding an all-purpose plasma cannon to air defense missiles to bomber to laser at will. The turrets you place can also transform into any number of weapons from your basic plasma turret to a rail gun (!!) to anti-air laser and pretty much everything in between. And if that’s not enough to choose from, you can pick up those turrets in the heat of battle and move them to where they are most needed any time you want.
That seems like a lot to keep track of, but we’re probably making it sound more complicated than it actually is. The campaign eases you into using all of these options at a steady pace beginning with a couple of tutorial stages and working your way up to building and using the most powerful weapons and abilities in your alien arsenal. By the time you have that many choices and that many angles your attackers are coming from, you should be well acquainted with not just the controls themselves, but the optimum use and placement of your turrets as well.

One of the other special abilities your turrets have is the ability to build an electric fence between them if they are placed closely enough to together. You can use this ability to shape most of the human attack paths, but be aware that there are some units which are perfectly capable of hopping those fences and others which will specifically target turrets to destroy them.

We’ve reviewed a number of tower defense games previously like Kingdom Rush and War in a Box: Paper Tanks, and we enjoyed playing them enough to give them a 9.0 and 7.0 rating respectively. However, if you made us choose between the three of them, X-Morph defense wins hands down.

Piloting the craft during each wave makes for a more immersive environment and the ability (and need) to switch weaponry and strategy mid-wave set X-Morph apart from our previously reviewed titles. Combined with the graphics, story line, voice acting, and sound effects; X-Morph Defense hits all the right notes for both gameplay and replayability.

The only place where the two other games exceed X-Morph Defense is in value. We have a prejudice against any game that costs us more than $10. (We are frugal gamers after all!) While the base game certainly does come in below that amount, when you add the three DLC included in the complete pack (European Assault, Last Bastion, and Survival of the Fittest) the price went just over $12. If you’re being ultra-frugal, you could skip the DLC entirely and pick up the game for less than half of that, but we have a feeling that you’d regret not picking up the complete pack with the bundling discount if you did.

We might be inclined to give X-Morph Defense a solid 10 out of 10 score, but we don’t want to be handing those out like candy. And besides, we want to give the developers a goal to shoot for with whatever comes next.