MorphX is the perfect example of why lower-budget software development still has an important role to play in the videogame scene. While big budgets can make for visually impressive, tightly produced titles, they also ensure that said games have to sell a lot of copies to make that money back. With many millions of pounds on the line this inevitably leads to design by committee and a reluctance to take risks. But when a game has a smaller capital input, as is the case with the Russian-developed MorphX, the designers can afford to make the kinds of decisions that might alienate portions of the audience but also ensure a healthy and diverse marketplace that offers variety without always pandering to the lowest common denominator. In this instance the potentially risky strategy Buku Entertainment adopted was to merge the puzzle genre with the third-person shooter, and thankfully it paid off rather well.
The game is set in Moscow, several years after a large scale alien invasion. The alien swarm managed to quickly decimate most of the Earth's concentrated armed forces and have since set about exploiting the planet's lifeforms and resources for their own ends. This has forced the remaining human population onto the backfoot, laying low, able to engage in nothing more than small guerilla attacks with a limited success rate. And in a nod to a certain Hollywood franchise things have only got worse since the swarm started to produce infiltrators based on human DNA, able to pass themselves off as human with the goal of identifying the locations of secret bases and installations. There's the odd twist and turn along the way with the player starting out having just escaped from one such processing centre, infected by the swarm and already beginning to mutate, which initially puts you in conflict with both the alien and human forces, neither sure which side of the fence you are on.

What's pleasing is that the game doesn't try and cover too much ground over the course of its duration, the developers have set up a global, near-insurmountable threat to the human race but rather than try and cover the entire storyline from discovery to destruction they've instead kept the plot localised to just the one occupied city. This has kept the story more tightly linked to the main character's emotional journey but hasn't stripped away the feeling of accomplishment provided by the ending. It may offer up only a small victory in the grand scheme of things but it's the first the humans have had in a long time and is a lot more believable than having the player cornily drive off the invasion over the course of a seven-hour adventure. MorphX may not win any awards for its story but it turns in a solid science-fiction world that ticks all the boxes required to provide a battle you can really immerse yourself in and has enough potential to easily support a series of titles.
The third-person shooter mechanics are rather reminiscent of the Suffering games from the last generation: turning is fast and responsive, as is player movement, there's no cover system in place and there's a very generous auto-aim. The result of which is relatively fast moving, arcade feeling combat experience. The auto-aim is unfortunately more generous than is really needed, lining up a bead on a enemy just requires pointing the camera within several metres of them and the game will happily arrange the sights on the target for you. This does diminish a lot of the satisfaction to be had from a ranged kill, but right from the start you're going to be required to mix it up with plenty of melee kills as well. And once the player has mastered some of the alien abilities, acquired as the mutation progresses, flicking between both forms of attack seamlessly in the combat situations livens proceedings up considerably. Such abilities include being able to reflect back enemies' attacks, a rage mode that converts melee damage dealt back in to health and the ability to see cloaked enemies and hidden objects.

It's this upgrade system which really sits at the core of MorphX; aiming is mostly handled for you while close combat is also relatively simple with attacks and combos all triggered off just the one button, but how you configure your character, choosing which upgrades to enable, is the key to really getting satisfaction from this game. The swarm evolve by marrying the genetics of their current creatures with those found in host populations to create new, superior lifeforms and this is exactly what the game allows you to do. As you explore the world you find hidden caches of alien DNA - these take the form of hexagonal pieces with connections on various sides, some are straight, others bend and others act as splitters, with different permutations available for each. The player is able to upgrade six different facets of their body, some are passive abilities such as the quantity of resources harvested from alien bodies and others control the quality of the active abilities you can trigger, and each of these upgrade paths has its own large grid of hexagonal tiles. Scattered across each of these unique layouts are a number of nodes separated into two types, which control different attributes of the ability. The player must use their tiles to connect these nodes together, with bonuses awarded for linking them by a single, interconnected network of DNA, as opposed to lots of independent, smaller chains.

In a world where even big budget RPGs are now forcing players down tightly controlled, linear upgrade paths this system is like a breath of fresh air. The player is free to upgrade these abilities in any order they choose, they are free to choose which elements of those abilities they want to improve and they are free to dynamically re-spec themselves at any time by removing previously placed tiles and replacing them. The way you configure these DNA paths has a huge impact on the capabilities and performance of your character. You have to adjust your setup on a regular basis as you encounter new, varied threats throughout the game. Crucially, because you never have as many DNA pieces as you would like, with splitters in really short supply, you are always forced to be selective about what you upgrade at any one time. Players can spend large amounts of time rewiring these grids to see if they can reduce the number of tiles they need or trying to find the best out of a number of sub-optimal solutions because they really do need that splitter tile for use on another grid. Because each of the upgrade screens are unique, choosing to upgrade a different ability can see the player having to re-evaluate all of their other layouts as a result of the limited tile availability. It's a genius implementation that's in-depth, sophisticated, has clearly been perfected through a lot of testing and is a damn fun experience to boot.

Spending time in this mode is crucial to doing well in the game because the knock-on effects on the player's capabilities are significant, rewiring your character's setup can result in a fundamental change in how you approach different scenarios in the game and it's this element of tight coupling between the action and puzzle elements that brings depth to the experience. In some ways this adds an action-RPG element to proceedings and the game does a good job of throwing new enemy patterns your way over the course of its nine levels, forcing you to analyse the challenges ahead and rearrange your upgrades regardless of any personal preferences in combat setup.

The one area where the game does seem to have been compromised is in adopting a regenerating health system. There's nothing inherently wrong in this but the designers have done a really good job of balancing the game without it. The player is able to replenish health from harvesting alien bodies, performing fatalities on them, engaging the rage special ability or, to a more limited degree, from scattered health stations. This works so well because, apart from the health stations, the effectiveness of all of these are controlled by a number of the upgrade possibilities. With the interlinked dependency between the likes of the rage power-up grid and that of energy harvesting efficiency, for example, adding even greater synergy. It's possible to play through the game entirely without utilising the regenerating health by tweaking and playing with the game engine through these upgrades and the inclusion of this is an unfortunate crutch that people can use to deprive themselves of one of the game's more involved, enjoyable elements.

As a third-person action game there are some nice, large-scale moments including being chased through city streets packed with human resistance fighters as a vast, multistory behemoth tries to end your existence. While the surroundings are often on the more basic side in terms of visuals there's a good ambience to many of the environments with atmospheric, bombed-out cityscapes, quiet, dusty interiors lit by pale skylights and the pre-requisite alien level. While the surroundings can have a tendency to look a little reminiscent of the previous console generation the enemy designs are fantastic and a definite step up. As with the plot there's some clear inspiration from a few other games and movies, with the player looking an awful lot like a Strogg mid-game and the Gunner enemy's profile rather reminiscent of the the shield drones from the recent Star Wars movies. That aside there's a lot of detail to them and plenty of variety thanks to the swarm's genetic crossbreeding, they do a great job of capturing that nasty sci-fi horror vibe.

MorphX is a thoroughly enjoyable experience, inventively mixing puzzle and action elements to create a hybrid that shows the big boys how a proper upgrading system should be done. Some facets of its production give away the smaller development team behind the game but there's nothing amateurish on show here. Instead you get a solid, well constructed game world with a couple of nice, large-scale boss encounters and enough novel features to make for an exciting, and somewhat refreshing, game to play.