There’s something to be said for games that incorporate FMV scenes. A game that knows how to enhance the experience as a whole with FMV is usually a game that could still be considered a good game without the additional gimmick. In recent years a number of small studios seem to have honed in on this fact, and as a result we, the consumers, have been treated to a number of excellent games.
Twisted Pixel, for example, has a few titles that used it well until they crossed the line with The Gunstringer. While it could be argued that the Kinect peripheral is to blame for some of the underwhelming feeling associated with The Gunstringer, it can’t change the fact that it was the first game Twisted Pixel released where their use of FMV was meant to carry the entire package, and that’s the aforementioned line: one that should never be crossed.
But Futuremark Games Studio’s Unstoppable Gorg manages to offer a solid experience even if you ignore the FMV scenes, and an incredible one if you immerse yourself in them. The videos themselves eschew the normal CGI techniques, turning instead to actual objects and costumed people. It’s this loving attention to detail that really cements the right way to incorporate FMV into a game.
It’s hard to imagine a genre of games more solid than the tower defense genre. It’s a concept so deceptively simple that it seems mind-blowingly difficult to mess up; the tower defense games floating around that aren’t so great seem to be that way by design. The problem, though, is innovation. Where do you go once you have your monster pathing and tower designs? Some games, like Toy Soldiers, let you actively play as one of your towers. Unstoppable Gorg lets you manipulate the entire battlefield.
On any given level you’ve got various orbital paths encircling the thing you need to protect from the waves of monsters. Spread out along these orbits are the empty emplacements to toss your towers on, but then you have the ability to grab those orbits and actively rotate them. It’s an ingenious addition to the tower defense genre, and it’s specifically required to beat the numerous story and challenge levels.
The monster pathing will often change; instead of having one or two set paths to place towers along, the paths will vanish and appear somewhere else, requiring the constant shifting of your towers to compensate. As the levels progress, there will often be multiple waves of enemies coming toward the center of the screen, leaving you scrambling to decimate a wave and quickly realign yourself to deal with the next. There are often times when you’ll be chasing enemy waves with a tower to whittle the health of the enemy down just enough for your next group of towers to finish the job.
As a tower defense game it is solid. There’s no other word for it. But it’s the FMV that really turns it into something worth the time you’ll put into it. The entire look, sound, and most importantly, feeling of Unstoppable Gorg is what the 1950s imagined the future would look like. It’s almost like if the Fallout universe fallout never happened, and then they all immediately went to space to fight aliens.
It isn’t often a game comes around that really lacks a flaw to focus on. Flaws exist to single out, explain, and reinforce why a game is fun despite them. Unstoppable Gorg doesn’t really have any of those. The worst that can be said is that, when it comes right down to it, it is a tower defense game. If you don’t like those you probably aren’t going to be blown out of the water here. If you like them, or at the very least don’t care either way, you’re looking at a story that will have you smiling from the sheer accuracy of the future, as depicted by the world of yesterday.
Rating: 
Unstoppable Gorg was provided for review by Futuremark Games Studio. It is available for $9.99 on Steam.
By at .
