Morphite

As much as I want to like this game, I just can't give a positive recommendation. In short, the game is full of glaring, tedious, and harmful bugs, the basic gameplay just doesn't offer very much to entertain the player and requires mostly walking and scanning identical polygons hundreds of times. There are elements of a good game here, but they're overshadowed by an extreme lack of polish or thought put into the design. In its current state, this game is flat-out not worth playing.

You'll notice while playing the story missions that they can break very easily. The developers had some extreme tunnel vision and thought the players would take certain routes on the terrain, and did not account at all for how the game would function if you, say, dropped down from a cliff a few steps earlier than they arbitrarily thought you would. You will miss the trigger for the next part of the mission for no reason, and if you do something else in the meantime, run the risk of soft-locking your save for good.

In order to gain any upgrades that'll make you faster, be able to scan from further away, do more damage, generally make the game less slow and repetitive, you need to gather a LOT of resources from visiting a LOT of planets, then hope you get lucky and find a space station that has the upgrade station you're looking for. I went almost my entire playthrough visiting every space station I found before I saw my first tool upgrade merchant. I didn't even realize you COULD upgrade your weapons and scanner until then.

Walking across the planets to gather resources and scans takes quite a while, and the landscapes look mostly the same. Sure, there's a charm to the low-poly and low shading style, but it doesn't work well here when not accompanied by environmental elements that help distinguish different areas. It's laughably easy to get turned around and lost on the non-story planets, and the map only helps a little.

Many important upgrades are locked behind rare scans, something you're only going to find if you're willing to scan the exact same thing you've already scanned, several dozen times. Traversing mostly barren land just to point and click at this same thing again and hope it's a rare scan this time, and hope your rare scan was the one you needed.


Now, I don't think this game is irredeemable, there's a lot of work put into it that's just waiting for a chance to shine. Here are some things that I think would go a long way toward improving Morphite.

1) Mark space stations from the system and star maps with what upgrade stations they have and the names of quests in those systems after you've visited them. Just having to randomly guess where your missions were and which stations had your upgrades is incredibly annoying.

2) Add a sprint key. I'm serious, just that little addition would do so much. Disallow tool/weapon usage while sprinting if you need, but let the player cross terrain faster, it's so incredibly tedious. More traversal options in general would be good, but sprinting is a good start.

3) The base scan distance needs to be longer, and you should be able to tell if there's a rare scan nearby without needing to run around and click every individual object. It's a waste of the player's time and offers no value to the game the way it currently is.

4) Add more random objects to non-story planets, allowing the player to navigate easier and remember where they've been. Better yet, add the ability to put waypoints on the map and lock the map orientation.

5) Fix the sound effects on Myrah's voice. The helmet comms effect is present on her voice lines even when she's not wearing the helmet. Small gripe, but it's very visible and I'm surprised this wasn't caught.

6) Re-do the scripting for story missions and the relevant triggers on the map. Seriously, it should not be this easy to accidentally break the game and have to restart from the beginning.

7) ADD MISSION MARKERS. Currently, when you receive a side-quest, you get no indication of where you need to go unless it's a little task on the space station you received it on, or in the rare cases the mission description tells you where it is. Saying "in the current system" isn't good enough when there are multiple other planets in the system that will take ages to explore and you aren't likely to get anything useful from your time there. You get bored and fly somewhere else. Then, that mission description is EXTRA useless because you don't even know where you got it from.

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Everything is so well aesthetically done down to the music and even just looking around. This game is so relaxing to play on free roam. I've bought this game multiple times now on other platforms because of this.

graphics, gameplay and story... I absolutely recommend this game!!

its fun at first, until they introduce the grappling hook and the racing. theres quite a few bugs still. but thats what seperates this game from being loved to just liked. still very enjoyable and for 15 bucks ive played quite a bit.

This game surprised me quite a bit, knowing it was an IOS game i didn't expect to put 21 hours into it. Combat is pretty simple, you see enemies you shoot em up, for a while you'll have just a pistol but things get a little more interesting when you get the charge laser. There are shops littered around on planets and space stations where you upgrade your weapons damage, fire rate and accuracy etc. You can only get new weapons by doing story missions though so if you want to do a lot of exploration early on you'll probably end up upgrading your pistol quite a lot.

In addition to the weapons you get some gadgets such as a grappling hook and a wand that generates holo platforms, these items become integral to the missions after you get them so you'll have plenty of opportunities to use them and they switch up the gameplay a bit too. The exploration is pretty cool too, if you like the graphics you'll like seeing how different environments are represented by this graphic style. Scanning plants and critters might become tedious over time for some but i found it kind of addicting early on. Only thing i didn't really like was the space combat, you cant really maneuver the ship at all, you have a dodge button which tilts the ship but i didn't find it that useful

Also i want to praise the developers for the story line and characterization in this game, it isn't complicated or complex but i found it kind of wholesome. The main character Myrah reminded me a lot of April Ryan from The Longest Journey games.

Good idea, good elements, sloppy execution. I visited planets that started story scenes far beyond where I was in the main quest, I would accidentally overcome puzzles by just walking to the goal, and an area on a wrecked station had patches of floor that I'd fall through to instant death, or hallways where I would "fall" sideways through a wall and outside the map to die. Sometimes I would dock with a station with text on screen saying I was landing on a planet, sometimes I'd scan an animal for the first time on a new planet and told I already have it, but scanning a second animal would succeed. I wish I coudl recommend this game but it needs too many repairs.

I hesitate to fully recommend this game, though my experience is mostly positive.

Morphite is a casual first-person Metroid-like game with an open world atmosphere and a somewhat interesting storyline. The main character is in search of a rare material called Morphite, and will be sent on a main mission that will lead her towards its discovery. In between missions, you are free to explore universe and collect materials to upgrade your equipment.

I consider Morphite casual because it doesn't force you to complete the main storyline right away. There is action-oriented combat when you approach aggressive creatures, but so far even the boss battles haven't been very exciting. What amuses me the most are the side missions. You can find some really bizarre requests if you talk to anyone and everyone you come across. From popping bubbles to free floating family members, to roasting marshmallows and throwing them into waiting maws, there are some fun things to do when you just wander around on your own.

Scanning can be fairly relaxing, if not a bit repetitive. There is a feeling of satisfaction from scanning all the creatures on a planet, especially since there is a purpose to it: Selling the common scans for money, and using the rare ones to upgrade your equipment. Unfortunately, this mechanic has a frustrating side to it. Scanning seems to work based on proximity, rather than direction; i.e., I may point the scanner at an insect in front of me, but if I'm standing right next to a flower, the scanner will want to scan the flower first, even if I'm not facing that direction. This turns what should be a completely satisfying event into a series of frustrating maneuvers, especially when you're trying to scan something aggressive before it can attack you.

I like that the space stations seem to be alive with activity. Often times you'll find residents who want to challenge you to minigames or ask you to do something around the station. I have even engaged in a few fights. I'm still not sure what purpose there is to buying food on the stations. I bought some cheesecake once, but all the game did was let me walk around with it in my hands.

For that matter, I'm still not sure what land vehicles and tamed animals are for. Every once in a while you'll find a village on a planet, and someone in that village will offer to let you rent their car or riding animal. The only time this wasn't a waste of money for me was when I landed on a planet with wide, open fields that I could cruise around. Most other planets have hills or stone "stairs" you have to hop on, and I haven't found a mount yet that can navigate them.

There are several mechanics in this game that I really like: 1) The ability to summon your drop pod. When you visit a planet, you drop down in a pod while your ship stays in orbit. Rather than having to walk all the way back to the pod, you can throw down a beacon and summon the pod to it. The beacon will automatically adjust itself to a safe spot, or let you know if there isn't one in close enough proximity.

2) Your health, fuel, and shields all recharge with enough time. While this mechanic does make the game seem super simple at times, it also saves me the trouble of abandoning a mission when it's barely just begun, which I appreciate.

3) Once you are technically out of ammo, your gun will slowly recharge up to a maximum of five rounds. This came in very hand in the beginning of the game, when the gun's ammo capacity is small.

I am, however, very frustrated by the upgrade system. The chambers used to upgrade your suit aren't found on every planet or station, so you might have all the ingredients and money in the world, and still have weak equipment because you can't find a place to get upgrades.

Again, if you're a casual gamer, this might be the action game for you. It's fairly simplistic in gameplay and graphics style, which can be great after a long day at work. But, if you're the kind of person who prefers heart-pounding action at the end of your day, this will not get your blood pumping at all.

A game with a quite good story and puzzles, for an indie game and price it really gives lot of hours of fun.

Good: +Quite long story (I took 10 hours to make it)
+Challenging Puzzles
+Good Visuals (even being a low poly)
+Good gameplay

Bad: -After you finish it, you have nothing more to do
-Good amount of bugs

Note: 8/10

Hmm this is another game I have a hard time giving a positive/negative review for since overall I LOVED THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF THIS GAME! Why am I giving it a negative review? Overall this game has a bit of a problem once you get half way through the story. Once you get the hover feature you can kind of easily sequence break this game.

This is something apparent on the next major story planet you can visit, Octillon (if I remember right) which allows you to skip nearly the entire planet and jumping up to the third planetary arc fragment VERY EARLY. This is a major problem cause you skip a few cutscenes, and I believe a fight with a boss which you cannot redo if you collect the arc fragment.

I stopped after that point. Before this I'll say this game was whole heartedly enjoyable. The biggest complaint I have outside of that is that each planet you land on is somewhat randomized what is on it. Besides story planets that is. So some planets have loads of planetlife and virtually no animals, others have no plantlife and tons of animals and lots of mineral deposits.

The biggest problem though is that often you will land on a planet that is like 90% empty space. There is NOTHING on the entire planet, which makes it feel empty.

the other major thing is I wish there was a way to turn OFF the enhanced clarity upgrade because it makes seeing underwater an IMMENSE PAIN. I got more lost underwater with the upgrade on than I ever did without it, sometimes in the bigger underwater areas getting lost for 3-5 minutes due to not being able to tell my orientation since everything's so DARK!

But the colors in this game are incredibly vibrant it truely gives you the feeling of exploring alien worlds. So its up to you what you make out of Morphite.

So many minor problems that add up too fast to enjoy.
The scanner has a 2 foot range and it has a tendency to turn off if blocked. unreliable for being chased by something hostile. The models also appear similar, so you constantly need to scan everything and get an error message saying you already scanned this. Also no discrepency to what can and cannot be scanned, plus animals are too fast to keep up with a laggy camera. Scanning is the main way to get money for upgrades, which are the only way to play the game without losing your sanity or dying. I have to assume this last part because the upgrade system needs a complete overhaul. I couldn't select anything to upgrade because the same button to select moves the category for what you're upgrading. I played 90 mins of a fool's errand to get credit to upgrade tech, just to find out that the game is too unpolished to actually upgrade any of it. I would be fine with all this if the game were in early access, but this is unacceptable if its finished. Needs some work done.

I bought the game in light of the Jim Sterling video and the glowing reviews. However, I was soon disappointed by what, to me, was the dead feeling of the universe in general. The constant need to scan things with no visual difference between the quality grades of each plant (weak, rare, strong, or diseased). Nor is there a difference between the limited selection of plants you can scan, and those you cannot. The repetitive nature of play and the sheer lack of packed content is both boring and bland. The constant need to scan takes up most of the gameplay and the space combat leaves much to be desired.

I’ve played fifteen hours of Morphite and have really enjoyed it so far. Some people compare it to No Man’s Sky (to the point that Youtube sticks a NMS icon on all Morphite Let’s Play), and to Metroid.

I can’t say anything about Metroid because I have no clue what it is. Maybe because there’s platforming?

Morphite has a fun, cute and effective main story that’s voice acted. I’m about 35% through the main quest (the game tells you that). It spans 15 hand-crafted planets, allowing for interesting puzzles. You can’t really rush through the main quest because your gear will be totally underpowered.

You need money to upgrade your ship, minerals to upgrade your tools and weapons, and scans (plants, minerals, fossils, tech, animals) to upgrade your suit. A bit like in Zelda games, upgrading your suit and acquiring new tools opens new areas, so take notes of where you’ve found locked or unreachable things.

There’s no free flight in Morphite. Click on a solar system, click Go, watch the two seconds warp animation and you’re there. Click on a specific planet or station, click Go, and watch the two seconds landing animation. We live in the future, autopilot exists.

There are however minigames in the form of space encounters. Sometimes you’ll man a turret to shoot at hostiles, sometimes you’ll navigate through a ridiculously dense asteroid field, but that’s the closest to flying you’ll get. There’s only one ship but you can (need to) upgrade it.

There are thousands of procedural planets, which you’ll want to visit for their resources, weird life forms, landscapes, villages, shops, and (usually silly) side quests. You won’t get a bajillion square miles of perlin height maps. Instead you’ll visit a couple of caves, fight in a tiny but dense forest, jump over one toxic river, find your way to the top of one platformingly nasty rock, etc.. Quality and variety before quantity. I’ve landed on 50 planets and I’m still discovering new things (first lava river last night!).

Oh, and there’s no inventory! Well, you do carry tools, weapons, scans, minerals, quest items, but they all show in their own list and stack infinitely. No weight, no slots, no encumbrance.

I haven’t finished the game so maybe I’ll get bored, maybe the end will suck, maybe I’ll encounter a game-breaking bug. I’ll write an update if that happens.

===== UPDATE =====

I've finished the game. My recommendation is a bit more tepid, now. The second half of the game is visibly less polished than the first and makes little annoyances more annoying.

* The checkpoint system is supposed to autosave your progress through the main quest, but it's really weirdly done: say you die or quit the game between talking to a quest giver and finishing a quest. Next time you load, the quest giver will still deliver their dialog as if you never started the quest, but they won't give you the item you need. The item isn't in your inventory or on the floor where you died either; in fact it's been magically teleported to where you were supposed to bring it. This is utterly confusing and caused me to believe I had been struck by a game-breaking bugs.

* You're going to see through walls, walk through missing colliders and fall through the level. It reminded me of Daggerfall.

So I consider this game as a very good Beta. It's fun, it's feature-complete, but it needs a few bug fixes and a layer of polish to avoid useless confusion.

Morphite feels like a well-rounded early access game. Solid gameplay, everything works, even some voice acting, but with fixes required. However, that said, the price is right for the game, and while I would love to see improvements made I am enjoying my time. The game is pretty much a zen-like experience, and even the combat could be removed simply in favour of puzzles and environmental platforming challenges.

The one thing that does bug me is that it appears like there are only a few models for plants and animals, and these are recycled endlessly, to the point where it is essential to scan everything just to see if you already have it. Even within "species" the variants (strong, weak, diseased, rare) all appear to be identical. I have not determined if there is an upgrade that allows you to see without scanning whether something is new, but better visual feedback here would be appreciated.

And no, I will not comment on whether or not this is a No Man's Sky killer, as I have not played NMS.

Positives
- Interesting art style
- Exploration
- Shoot everything that does and doesn't move
- Interesting story
- Very casual experience

Negatives
- Some of the procedural generation results in very strange clipping and texture errors
- Have fallen through the floor on more than one occasion
- Minimap is nearly useless
- Planets and space stations quickly feel samey
- Colour palette could be more varied on the planets, and especially on the space stations
- Plant and animal variation limited

Morphite is an enjoyable casual game that offers a bit of adventure & exploration.

I created this review near the game’s initial release so please keep in mind that things can be fixed or changed since the point of this review. Also, since the game is still quite new I'll try to omit any bugs from this review and rather focus on the points that I enjoy or dislike about this game.

First, The Cons:
- Resources seem a bit low to obtain for the potential upgrades needed, the game is already quite casual and the pace of gathering resources is already low so expect it to take a while to upgrade your ship, suit, and weapons.
- There’s no run button… You don’t move that slow and you can later upgrade your movement speed with resources, but there’s no run button.
- Not enough interaction within space stations. It would be nice if I could destroy computers or plants for resources. Or have some kind of consequence like hostile station visors if you shoot them or take the resources from that room. I don’t have any sense of ‘new’ or unexpected when visiting them unlike planets.
- I noticed the same 'pattern' for a few planets, the same slopes, the same layout segments. It's not overwhelming but noticeable enough for some maps to feel 'visited'
- Scanning things can get annoying for being a major aspect of the game. Tiny bugs are sometimes almost impossible regardless of scanner upgrades.

Pro's
- Simple graphics that doesn't look ugly
- Plenty of content, mineral harvesting, exploration, missions, storyline, side quests, space interactions, player, ship, weapons, etc upgrades.
- There are plenty of planets to explore and each new visit leaves me enjoying the visit with a 'new' enough experience.
- Additional weapons are unlocked with a 'Metroid' feel behind it which kicked up some nice nostalgia for me.
- Creatures and AI interactions are nice in that anything could be hostile, fearful, or careless with the players presence.
- There's nothing to ruin my playing experience. No hunger bars, no nagging messages, no stamina meters, no small inventory space, no survival gauges, just a nice Casual / Exploration game that was designed with the intent of being ENJOYED.
- Why couldn't NNS be more like this game.

Overall, it's not a bad game for the price, but there is plenty of rrom for improvement & bug fixes.

A playable version of No Man's Sky.

The core Gameplay is the same but this only costs 15$ and it has a lot more content in the game at the same time. Here is just a small list of all the things Morthite has over NMS:

Good Interfaces
Good inventory management
Voice acting
Boss fights
Combat against more than drones
Side Quests
Aliens that walk around
Diffent Weapon Typs
etc

I have to mention that the game has a few minior bugs right now, but nothing Game breaking. The most annoying thing being that the Cut-scene trigger areas are too small for a game where you can wall jump anywhere and so might miss the point you are supposed to enter an area.

The game starts off good, but it goes downhill before too long. The voice acting is decent, for the most part, but let down by one or two scenes. The main reason I can't recommend this game is that minor issues pile up after a while.

After finding the third key to open a gate on one of the story missions, waiting for the gate to open and using a grappling hook to get through the gate, I managed to fall through the world and die. After this the gate already had three keys in it, but my checkpoint had been at a location where the gate was still closed. So there was no way for me to progress short of replaying a whole level (planet?).

Also, I don't know how late in the game the spaceflight and ground vehicles shown in the trailer appear, but I didn't reach them. Also, while you can scan plants and animals for upgrades, this is not what you need for weapon or suit upgrades. I had a boatload of currency by the time I gave up, but not enough "Quantium" or "Lumite" to upgrade anything other than my ship.

The useless nature of ship upgrades is another thing. In my 5-ish hours I had two instaces of ship combat, which lasted maybe 20 seconds each. As a result I never felt the need to upgrade my weapons for my ship and instead save my money hoping for a random trader to sell me minerals so I could get useful upgrades for my guns which never seemed to have enough ammo.

I returned to this game a few days ago, from years of hiatus cus i now have a better rig. The game has a lot of problems at least on windows 10, configuration options do not work and you can get stuck on the menu closing it forever in a nightmarish loop. It has some quirks and bugs that i'm not sure have always existed but i've been soft-locked a few times thanks to them, shame, i really was looking forward to play it to the end.

The No Man's Sky killer? Not quite.

In this review a want to adress 2 different subjects, one is the game as itself, and the other is the title "NMS done right" as put by many other reviewers... i have been too long chasing this fabled "NMS done right" and i have always come out empty handed... this is no exception, this is NOT like No Man's Sky AT ALL. (to read about this, skip to the bottom of my review)

Morphite is an exploration/platformer/puzzle game. It has many common elements with the Metroid Prime series, down the female character, we have then some dungeon crawling with passive and agressive wildlife, we shoot things to get health/ammo/etc, and we scan different creatures. We can get different upgrades for our scanners/suit/weapon, upgrades that will allow us to resist new enviroments, open new paths and such, standard metroid content here.
-Graphics are all made of big polygons and bright colors, i'm not going to complain here as it's only an artistic choice, you may like it or not, but it's not the game's fault.
Music feels aproppiated, no complains here either.
-Controls are a little "off" specially when trying to guess where are you going to land as we have many small platforms sections that might get a little frustrating, but a little practice you will get better. The scanner range (at least the initial one) is so small that you have to be face to face with your target, making scanning hostile animals a little dangerous.
-The story seems alright if something generic, and i didn't care much for the "young and reckless" protagonist... the cat it's kind of funny i guess as he seems to voice my own thought many times.
All in all, Morphite it's ok. Maybe a bit "poor man's Metroid Prime" i guess.
An 8/10 seems an alright rating for me.

Now, as a NMS killer...
The opening of the game hints a lot about NMS... the ships, the space stations, the space traveling setting, even the drop pods look the same, and this about as similar as they get.
-You can't fly your ship, just pick a solar system, and then planets/space stations from a menu, the ship will get you there and drop you off in a escape pod.
-The planets are not planets, they are just walled and closed areas, with platforms, switches to press, creatures to kill, and loot to get, it's all pretty linear and completely different from the planets from NMS

Those might be only two points, but by themselves they destroy any hope to compare both games, except to people blinded for their hate for NMS, who will end up claiming that Super Mario Galaxy was NMS done right. Morphite is not a bad game but it's nothing like No Man's Sky and i wasted more money on my quest to find my holy grail...
Just played Morphite for an hour, but i'm not petty enough to refund it, even if i won't touch it ever again. Morphite is a good game, but if you are looking for "NMS done right" keep looking as this is not.

This is a fun game. Nice chill environments, neat puzzles. Runs glued at 60fps on my 3 year old machine. Most definately worth the asking price. Highly recommend if you like exploration and puzzle games.

This game isn't perfect, but its calming and incredibly fun. I would recomend this game to any of my friends.