When I first saw Orcs Must Die! at this year’s PAX East, it was easy to see the potential of what developer Robot Entertainment was promising. By having an added emphasis on third-person combat and a physical presence on the field, OMD! certainly had the right ideas behind it even back in March. Tower defense games have been a well-tapped market for a very long time now; up to the point that I personally find them incredibly dull and derivative. Well, I’m happy to be here today to tell you that, if we see more games like Orcs Must Die!, then there may be hope for the genre yet.
You have to give kudos to any game that can sum up its premise in under a minute. Orcs Must Die! begins with a brief thirty second movie that tells the player all he needs to know. Long story short, the group known as the War Mages is tasked with defending portals, known as rifts, against the never-ending threat of an orc invasion. One particular War Mage suddenly dies, due to his own unfortunate clumsiness, and it is up to his insufferable ass of an apprentice to step up and defend these rifts.
Players in OMD! assume the role of said jerk. Maybe that’s not the correct term for the smarmy hero of our tale, but it’s tough to find the right words to describe someone who quotes Charlie Sheen Twitter messages and performs a rather un-provocative hip thrust dance at the end of every mission. While it’s easy to loathe the guy, this intentionally obnoxious protagonist really encapsulates the tone of OMD! rather well. As heavy a task as repelling countless orc invaders may be, it’s never to be taken seriously.
In typical tower defense fashion, the game is broken into several missions which have both a setup phase and action phase. With a limited number of slots available, players choose from a small assortment of weapons and traps which increase in variety as the campaign progresses. As the player fends off wave after wave of orcs, kobold, ogres, and other fantasy monsters, currency is earned to buy more traps and temporary defenses. Different enemy types traverse the level in different ways; with the usual suspects of fast but weak runners, airborne hostiles, and the like. At first glance this is well-tread territory, and for the first few hours of Orcs Must Die! there can be a bit of “been there, done that” fatigue.
This exhaustion only last for a few missions as OMD!’s depth makes itself known. As new traps become available to the player, new potential combinations become available. Should the spring trap be used to fling the orcs into the nearby lava? Or is it better to slow them down first with some tar traps and then let them walk en masse into a nearby waiting buzz saw wall? Most of the traps in Orcs Must Die! are on a cooldown and players need to take into account that the rather lethal arrow-firing wall trap they’ve come to love only fires a few times a minute. New defenses and weapons unlock constantly from the start of the game to its very last levels, so there’s never a lack of options to explore when it comes to setting traps.
Aside from discovering new trap combinations and earning new additions to the available arsenal, there’s also a bit of persistence outside of the missions themselves. How well one does in a level determines how good a skull rating is received afterwards. The skull rating is very much like the typical star rating (going from one skull to five), except there’s an added twist here. The skulls aren’t just a slap on the back for a job well done, but instead are used to permanently upgrade traps of your choice.
Any of the over twenty weapons and traps in Orcs Must Die! can be upgraded once to receive bonuses such as a shorter cooldown, cheaper building cost, or other general improvements. These upgrades are linear in progression, but having to choose which trap gets your hard-earned skulls adds another layer of complexity to the experience.
Midgame into Orcs Must Die!, the player is greeted with another layer of options in the form of the Weavers, a duo of lady wizards who provide mission-long upgrades. In an either/or scenario, players can choose from one of two skill trees to focus on for the duration of their mission. One skill tree strengthens traps and their associated functions, while the other tree benefits the player directly with such options as increased health and damage. While everyone will certainly have their own play style, it’s smart to pick the right set of skills for the mission at hand.
Similar to another recently released tower defense game, Sanctum, there is an emphasis in OMD! on player-controlled combat. While most entries in this genre restrict all the action to an overhead view, Orcs Must Die! takes place in a third-person perspective with the player controlling the apprentice. Should the traps prove insufficient to stopping the throng of orcs barreling towards the rift (which they often will), players can use weapons such as swords, crossbows, and various fantasy weapons to cut enemies down. Each item in the apprentice’s arsenal, each of which takes up trap slots, has its own alternative fire attack capable of slowing down or pushing back invaders.
After a few gentle tutorial levels, the action in Orcs Must Die! builds up surprisingly quick towards a feeling bordering on anxiety. It’s not long before players are thrown headfirst into situations where they’ll need to lay down traps, watch for side routes, deal with multiple orc entrances, and engage in direct combat all while keeping a watchful eye on the mini-map.
The action is made all the more intense due to the limited camera perspective. As mentioned before, most tower defense games take a very laidback top-down perspective, but players in OMD! will need to constantly be on their toes if they want to keep up with the ensuing chaos.
And if there’s one thing Robot Entertainment’s newest release is, it’s chaotic. Particularly in the second half of the campaign, there are countless enemies on screen at any given time and it can be a harrowing task to stop every single one of them. Things are made all the more frantic by the sheer amount of information flying in the player’s face at any given time: on-screen prompts declaring headshots and a constantly running ticker for the orc killing spree add to the visual noise of the game.
In those magical moments where a cluster of orcs are flung by a spring trap, land beneath a ceiling trap, and are (expectedly) crushed causing the killing spree score to go berserk, it’s impossible not to feel a rush of gleefully twisted excitement. One could almost call it the video game equivalent of playing a great pinball machine; at that very moment when all the lights are flashing and everything is buzzing or banging away, there’s an inescapable sense of blissful joy.
For as sweet an experience as Orcs Must Die! is, it’s not a particularly long one. A first time play through of OMD! will take most players under five hours to complete, but to be fair it’s an incredibly addictive and enjoyable time while it lasts. There’s a bit of replayability in the form of a “nightmare” difficulty setting which unlocks after completing the game, the usual host of achievements for both PC and console, as well as the standard leaderboards. Players are also encouraged to go back and earn top marks on previous levels so they can fully upgrade the trap arsenal. Diehard fans of tower defense will likely be compelled to master all the game has to offer, but your standard gamer will likely be in for as long as the campaign lasts.
By succeeding in all it sets out to accomplish, Orcs Must Die! manages to not only be a great game but also a solid argument in favor of more tower defense style games. It’s clever, quite addictive, and chock full of so much strategic depth that it gives one hope for the potential of future tower defense games. While it’s unlikely that every new contender in the genre will measure up to what Robot Entertainment has created here, it certainly speaks well for what developers can accomplish with a genre considered by many to be limited in scope.
