PS4’s X-Morph: Defense is a unique hybrid of twin-stick shooter and tower defence

Hi PlayStation Blog, this is Paweł Lekki, co-founder of EXOR Studios. I’d like to announce our new game called X-Morph: Defense that is coming soon to the PlayStation 4.

The game is, what we believe, a pretty unique blend of a twin-stick shooter and tower defense. You are the X-Morph – an alien that lands on Earth. You arrival is seen as a threat, and the conflict starts; humanity defending the planet by attacking you, and you defending yourself by destroying them.

The aliens land in many different places across the globe – South Africa, Australia, USA, Japan, Germany, the shores of the Caspian Sea. The X-Morph visits all continents (except Antarctica).

Production on X-Morph: Defense started right after we released Zombie Driver HD on the PS3 (which some of you might still remember). The game’s development has taken us around four years, so hopefully you like what we’ve cooked up.

What we hoped to achieve was to combine a classic top-down shooter with a tower defence game that could be enjoyed by fans of both genres. Shooter enthusiasts can upgrade their ship and annihilate the enemies directly, while strategists can invest in more advanced towers, plan elaborate mazes and outsmart their human enemies.

In X-Morph: Defense you have to defend your base from waves of incoming human forces. Each wave is preceded by a setup phase in which you can check what types of enemies are going to be attacking you, and observe their paths. There is no time limit for this phase, letting you carefully plan your defences.

One of the game’s key features is that the levels are built in a way similar to the RTS genre rather than tower defence, so there is huge freedom in building. Say goodbye to predefined enemy movement paths. You can blow up a bridge with enemies on it or tear down a skyscraper to crush everything beneath and block the passage.

After the setup phase is over you can directly engage the enemy with your fighter. X-Morph offers a very solid shoot’em up experience with a large variety of weapons, special abilities and enemies to attack. The X-Morph fighter can morph into four distinct forms, each of which has a basic attack mode and a special charged attack: slow down time, cut down buildings with dark matter bombs, create gravitational anomalies that suck in smaller enemies or charge up EMP bursts that disable air units and send them crashing straight into the ground.

Destruction is something that we really put a lot of effort into. You can destroy buildings, bridges, trees, cars and all sorts of smaller things. Almost everything is destructible. X-Morph: Defense runs on our own “Schmetterling” engine, which is custom built for this purpose and is optimised to handle hundreds of physically simulated objects at the same time.

As a culmination point in some levels, you will face huge mecha, which are determined to destroy your base. They are relentless and will stop at nothing to destroy you, even if this means smashing through buildings. Believe me, cities will be destroyed!