The Unstoppable Gorg is Stoppable

Unpredictability can be a good thing. The now co-opted marketing term, “Battlefield moments” are delightful because of their unpredictability, their emergence from a set of rules. Unpredictability can be very much intentionally designed into a game as well. A game can throw a wrench into one’s plans and the resulting player adaptation can be wonderful. But the problem comes when the game doesn’t let one adapt to this wrench, to remove the wrench and throw it back. Unstoppable Gorg, a tower defense game developed by Futuremark, has this problem and it is why I don’t want to play it anymore.

In Unstoppable Gorg, the paths of the enemies are fixed—as opposed to tower defense where one shapes the path by way of unit placement. Since it is set in space, a planet or ship will sit in the center of the screen (acting as the base that needs to be protected) while alien motherships at the edge of the screen will send units to attack it. Different lines will show up to display the path the enemies will take from the mothership to the planet. The defensive units can be placed on fixed points on rings of various sizes that encompass the planet. The twist here is that the rings can be rotated, thus moving the defensive unit’s position. The game attempts to be a balance of smart placement of units and adapting to different situations via the rotation of these rings, but both of these core elements are undermined.

The enemy paths will change suddenly between waves (the wrench in the plan) yet because the very limited options one has for unit placement it is extremely hard to adapt to. It is worth looking at something like PixelJunk Monsters, which is a prominent tower defense game with fixed enemy paths as well. Here, any tree in the forest can be chopped down and a unit erected in its place. The options for placement are numerous, while frequently Unstoppable Gorg’s number of areas where a unit can be placed is very limited. The rotation of the rings that the units are placed on appears to be an alternative adaptation technique but it does not work out well in practice.

As the game takes place in space, the options for the enemy path are essentially limitless. There is no natural boundary in the environment that can be examined as in something like PixelJunk Monsters. In Monsters, one can determine where there is a point an enemy will likely have to pass; one can determine what area will become a choke point; one can determine what particular position will have most effective use of a unit’s range. Unstoppable Gorg lacks the information for one to do any basic evaluation and therefore select the best points for unit placement. The only path shown is the very first path enemies will take and a second path can show up literally seconds after the first started.

It is uncouth unpredictability in a game that is about predicting outcomes. It is inflexibility in a game that is about adapting. What the game is about is at odds with what the mechanics allow. It makes the Unstoppable Gorg a very bad game, one that I don’t care to finish.