Orcs Must Die! Review

Following up from our previous coverage of "Orcs Must Die!", which has been a video look of the demo and a Q&A with developer Robot Entertainment, it's now time for a review of the game.

Over the course of the weekend I've been murdering why way through the game and am now ready to render a verdict on the qualities of the game.

In this game the orcs must die. And so they do.

Orcs Must Die! is another entry in the growing niche of "tower-defense-meets-3rd-person-action" games, which have most recently been successfully visited in "Trenched" and "Toy Soldiers: Cold War".

Dumping you into a colorful fantasy world of poorly planned fortresses and inept orcs with extreme suicidal tendencies, Orcs Must Die! gives us a fairly fresh setting to play tower defender in.

As the inept, wisecracking wizard apprentice, you find yourself as the last hope of the world against the orc hordes, after your master is killed in an unfortunate intestinal slip incident.
Not easily deterred, you immediately set about defending the magical "rifts" (no affiliation to "Rift" the MMO, as far as I can tell. At least no weird tentacles coming out of these ones), which are located in 24 different fortresses that comprise the main campaign of the game.

Aiding your defense of said rifts are a number of traps and a few magic items, doled out appropriately over the course of the campaign.
These traps include simple devices like tar pits to slow down your enemies, as well as more exotic creations, such as a "wall grinder", which consists of two spiked rollers that suck in hapless orcs passing by too close, and spits out the resulting giblets (so this is not an "E" rated game then).

You will also get access to two different kind of "guardians", which take the form of either archers or sword wielding paladins.

Making good use of archers is key to success on many of levels of the game

At the start of every level you get a chance to pick out what weapons, traps, guardians and magic items that you want to use in that level.
Since some traps are somewhat dependent on specific layouts of the fortress, you'll want to scout around the level first, before committing yourself to a specific setup.

There is plenty of time to do this, since the green tide does not begin flowing until you say so.
But once it starts you'll be subjected to several consecutive waves with only 15 seconds or so between them, where you can make small adjustments on the fly, so it's important to have a good basic kill setup before you let the chaos begin.

Enemies come in a few different varieties. The basic orcs act as cannon fodder and fuel for your economy, while small speedy kobolds will try to sprint straight to your rifts and massive ogres walk straight through hails of arrows and smash up your guardians.
And then there are the flying enemies to contend with on some levels, who will frustrate you by bypassing all you ground traps.

What are you doing here, Hogger?

About midway through the game you'll also unlock a feature called "weavers", which lets you specialize into a few different trees (traps, weapons or support) during the level, adding another strategic layer to the game.

The gameplay generally feels very tight and there is a good pacing to the levels that ensures you always feel busy but rarely overwhelmed.
The controls are responsive and the game does a good job of making you feel powerful enough that you make a considerable difference on the battlefield, but not so powerful that it makes all your traps and guardians feel weak or irrelevant.

The cartoon-like graphics are really polished and everything in the world looks appropriately over the top comical, from huge maces swinging from the ceiling to the look of the scurrying kobolds.
The vibe is very light throughout the game and the apprentice himself is constantly making (very) bad puns about orc killing. These are kinda funny for a while, but you'll probably be quite tired of them well before you reach the last of the 24 levels of the game ("orc salsa"... great pun, man. About 10 levels ago!).

In its own way, Orcs Must Die! is actually a pretty slick looking game

Orcs Must Die! is not a particularly long game, but I spent a respectable 8 hours going through the campaign on the normal difficulty level, which is more than reasonable for a game at this price point.
Should you still have a craving for more orcish genocide after you've been through the campaign, or if you're itching for achievements, then there is a "Nightmare" difficulty mode that should keep you satisfied for a bunch of hours more (depending on the severity of your masochistic tendencies).

On the more negative side, I found that there were a lot of traps that I simply did not use, except to just see what they looked like.
It's very easy to just stick with a tried and tested setup, where you're only changing one or two traps depending on the specific fortress layout.

You could argue that it is my own fault for not experimenting with all traps, but the game does not really encourage you much to use new traps.
They are simply dumped into your lap and it is up to you to work out when and how to best use them.
It would have been nice if the game was structured so that there was always a level that was appropriately laid out to show you the advantage of every trap, but this is something that is left to the players own curiosity to explore.

There are lots of cool traps in Orcs Must Die! It's just a shame the game doesn't encourage you more to use them all

There is no multiplayer in the game and going through the exact same 24 levels on a harder difficulty may not be exactly what you are looking for to increase replay value.
But I think it's safe to make the assumption that we will at least see more fortresses as DLC, so that should give Orcs Must Die! a bit more (green) legs.

Wrapping up, I would say that Orcs Must Die! is a very entertaining game that presents the player with a very focused experience that manages to stay enjoyable for the duration of campaign.

It doesn't really break any new ground as such, but if you're looking for something to cleanse your palette with between all the giant blockbuster releases that are being dumped into the market these days quicker than you can say "oh my, where did all my money go?", then Orcs Must Die! should do that job very well, thank you very much.



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