X-Morph: Defense Play the Invader

Towers here are not fixed slots on a map. You can place them almost anywhere, connect them with laser fences, and steer enemy columns down whatever route you design. A long winding maze of cheap towers works, or fewer, specialized ones: flame towers for fast ground units, artillery for slow crowds, anti-air lasers for heavy bombers. Before each wave you get an unlimited planning phase to study where the humans will come from. Or skip the planning and drop towers mid-battle. And since nearly everything from picket fences to skyscrapers collapses under simulated physics, you can drop a bridge on an advancing column instead of shooting it. That is a legitimate strategy, not just a good time.

When towers are not enough, you take off. Your fighter morphs into four forms, each with a basic attack and a charged special. The Plasma Fighter handles air and ground equally. The Dark Matter Bomber slows time and drops a bomb that cuts through buildings and crowds of infantry. The Shredder clears the sky of human aircraft. The Laser Destroyer melts single large targets and can pull a gravitational anomaly that sucks smaller units in. You are not a spectator watching your defenses work: you fly to wherever the line is buckling and fix it personally, then swoop back to collect resources from the wreckage while deciding whether shooting or salvaging matters more this second.

The humans defending Earth field enormous building-sized war machines, and each boss fight is its own set piece that wrecks the map around you. Entire cities come down over the course of a fight, and the destruction is not decoration: rubble changes the battlefield and the routes enemies can take. The campaign casts you as the invader harvesting Earth and terraforming it, which makes for an unusual perspective in the genre. The story itself is simple, and that is fine, because the draw is the spectacle of a desperate defense slowly losing to your towers. The final mission is a real difficulty spike, so expect the last stand to demand your full attention.

Split-screen co-op runs through the whole campaign, and the missions are rebuilt around two players: enemies attack in larger numbers and from new directions, so going solo-style will not hold. The classic split is one player optimizing tower placement while the other flies and shoots, but you can also both pour firepower into the biggest threat on the map. It is the kind of setup where plans fall apart mid-wave and someone shouts about the bombers they missed, which is half the point. If you have a second controller and a friend who enjoys causing mayhem together, this is where the game is at its most fun.