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Tower defense games have shown a prolific catalogue of solid games in recent years, especially with the popularity of mobile gaming. To many though, that’s what tower defense games are, stripped down strategy games for platforms with very limited and minimal control. One might disagree though, a certain old playstation series known as Tecmo’s Deception (and the later mundane PS2 title known as Trapt) can easily be claimed as a tower defense series as you ward off enemies from a certain room in a deserted mansion/castle. Orcs Must Die! does feel a lot like that old series in many ways.
You take on a role of a war mage who gets promoted from his apprentice status the second his master (and teacher) dies from a freak accident while protecting the rift from hordes of orcs. As you progress in the game, you find out that the other war mages have been dropping like flies and that you’re the last of your kind. More of the “in there for the sake of being there” story opens up as you progress.
Where the fiction does shine though is that the characters in this game have a lot of charm, While the orcs are charging head on to the rift, not minding the set up traps that are all over the level. You hear them complain about how much they really do hate their job, which just gives them character. The war mage you play (that looks a lot like Serious Sam and a caricatured version of Nathan Drake from Uncharted) a meat-headed asshole and does not make an effort to mask that, which also makes him a likeable character.
You play the game in a series of levels, each level comes with different obstacles and environmental hazards, the main objective is to ward off orcs and enemies away from “The Rift”. The orcs’ arsenal gets bigger with every level but so does yours, in each level you are introduced to new traps, weapons, guardians, spells and facilities to improve on your strategies. There is a good variety of traps for you to play with, the game does a great job in letting you experiment with the level’s surroundings too, you can directly damage your enemies with spike and blade traps, or catapult them with spring loaded traps to pits of lava, the beginning of the level or even to other spring loaded traps.
Each level, you are to select a fixed number of those traps and tools to carry on your objective of fighting off the hordes of Orcs. Like any tower defense, the game gives you somewhat of a hint on where they will be coming from and what paths would they take. If you win, you gain a number of skulls to upgrade your traps in between levels, if you lose you’ll have to start over.
My only gripe with the game is that it doesn’t save the template of trap combinations that you pick before starting every level, you have to go through everyone, picking them individually in order to start. Starting over from an initial failure would be alright, but when it’s a restart a mere seconds into the level can be annoying and the game is a series of trial and error. It would be nice if it at least keeps the previous list intact for you to change later.
The game is good fun, with leaderboards for you to compare scores with friends in each level and overall.
What We Think: As a fan of tower defense games, I absolutely adore Orcs Must Die! I don’t remember the last time I had fun victimizing mindless victims into their doom. The game is around $15 on steam (and costing around the same on XBLA), a whole lot of good game for its humble price.
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