A fun gimmick is hampered by a lack of polish and
structural issues, making this a transformative shooter with serious
growing pains.
Morphies Law is a team based objective shooter with a day of the dead
themed aesthetic and a strong gimmick - namely that, when you shoot an
enemy, you steal mass from that part of their body and add it to your
own. Get a series of headshots, for example, and you'll be tottering
around as a bobblehead. Rake someone's legs with bullets, meanwhile, and
you'll start strutting around like Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror
Picture Show.
All of the game modes hang off this central idea of stealing mass
from others in order to win, and in this way it's quite like Splatoon
with its own focus on painting more turf than the enemy team. Indeed,
one only needs to glance at Morphies Law to see that it's taken a hefty
amount of inspiration from its ink throwing cousin. It's a deliberate
positioning that is both smart - Splatoon is an excellent game - and
unfortunate, because Morphies Law isn't one. A very familiar aesthetic.
The beauty of Splatoon is that it's a shooter that doesn't make
gunning down the other team the be all and end all. By playing the
objective - which is to say covering the map in ink - you can be every
bit as useful as the player racking up tens of kills. The main gimmick
of Splatoon permeates every level of the game, broadening your options
and ensuring that you're always being useful.
The main premise of Morphies Law, meanwhile, almost always relies
on getting into a firefight with another player and coming out on top.
It puts shooting other players front and centre, pushing the mass
stealing mechanic out of the limelight and into the realm of vaguely
amusing side effect. It doesn't matter how comically enlarged my bum is,
after all, if I don't win the shootout. Someone skipped right arm day
One exception is a mode called Mass Heist, which is undoubtedly the
best this game has to offer. In this mode, players must work together
in order to deactivate the shield on the other team's avatar (a hulking
great player model that watches over the battlefield) and harvest mass
from it, waddling back to a randomly placed altar to bank that mass for
one's own team. In this mode, how much mass - and therefore how fast you
can move - becomes a genuine tactical consideration. Is it better to
make several trips carrying only a little mass, or risk everything on
one great lumbering score?
In these moments, Morphies Law comes close to invoking the same
kind of magic as the game it so clearly seeks to emulate - it's just a
shame they're so fleeting. Still, the shooting in Morphies Law does, at
least, provide you with tactical options. You can unlock plugins for
each bit of your body, choosing one of these at the start of each match
to provide you with a special ability - the first you unlock, for
instance, is a deployable bubble that protects you from enemy fire.
Similarly, a weapon crafting system allows you to pair a weapon body
with a secondary attachment, giving you a range of options in terms of
weapon type and alternate fire. You can even fill up a super meter and
take control of your team's avatar for a few seconds, firing a damaging
electrical beam at the enemy or deploying a moveable shield to protect
your teammates. The results screen is often good for a laugh.
These systems add some welcome tactical depth to proceedings. They
give players a reason to grind up the ranks and prove that a decent
amount of thought has gone into Morphies Law. A lack of polish in the
overall execution, however, greatly hampers the experience. The audio is
often ghastly - bullets ricochet off metal surfaces with a grating clang
that, repeated hundreds of times each minute, is a real assault on the
senses. The red damage indicator is often a bit off, which convinced me
more than once that I was being flanked when I was, in fact, just being
shot at by the person I'd already engaged with. Traversing the level
with abilities like the jetpack (which fires out your bum, by the way)
is often a janky experience when playing online, limiting the usefulness
of these traversal mechanics by stripping them of their fluidity. The
UI will give you an overview of which side is winning a match, but
offers little tactical information beyond that. It's hard to get a sense
of a cohesive team as a result, and harder still to work out where
you'd be most usefully placed (although, to be fair, it doesn't really
matter so much when your main objective is 'shoot the other guys').
The overall impression, then, is a fairly underwhelming one.
Morphies Law has a great idea behind it, but a muddled structure and
clunky execution combine to make a game that feels like it's holding
itself back. In essence, I think Morphies Law has done itself a
disservice by trying so hard to be like Splatoon rather than leaning
into its own ideas. From the level design and presentation right down to
the choice of font, it forces the player to equate the two games and,
unfortunately for Morphies Law, it simply doesn't come out that well
from the comparison. Playing Morphies Law and not Splatoon is basically
the video game equivalent of ordering a pint of coke at a bar, only to
be asked 'is pepsi alright?' It'll do, but it's certainly not my first
choice.
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