Picking Up Steam: Orcs Must Die! (PC)
In the tower defense game Orcs Must Die!, portals to the human world are under threat by hundreds upon hundreds of orcs, and while you are given the means to build traps and other dangers in their path to slow it, you’ll find early on the traps are not nearly powerful enough to wipe out the orcs alone. You’re going to have to get your hands dirty as well, charging in with crossbow, sword, and magic spells to repel the hordes. Once you can afford more traps though, the dynamic starts to shift, and when you can watch the toughest of your enemies fall to those traps you worked towards without having to raise another finger to fight, it’s all the more satisfying because you felt first hand how hard the waves of enemies were to repel.
Orcs Must Die! sees you playing as the final member of the Order. A group of wizards once helped hold the line between the human world and that of the orcs, but the orcs have somehow become more organized lately, allowing them to charge all at once and slaughter almost the entire Order. You are the last remaining member available to protect the Rifts, and as your late master narrates the story, he’s not shy about saying how unfit you are for the task. Rather than some gifted mage, you play as the least promising apprentice of the Order, a meathead who doesn’t really seem to take his role seriously or even approach this now dire situation with the gravitas it is owed. Instead, he seems to do magic and orc slaying for the fun of it, the hero a bit dim-witted but not really mean or unlikeable. He may whip out some dated references to Charlie Sheen memes like “WINNING!”, but it’s the kind of goofy harmless machismo that also leads to fun little touches like the various energetic dances he can finish a level with and his voice lines celebrating some particularly effective orc killing are pretty easy to get on board with. You’re going to be working hard to repel the orc invasion, so some simple excitement over the glorious bloodshed caused by your death traps feels warranted.
In a level of Orcs Must Die!, you’ll find yourself in a usually somewhat small set of rooms and halls, orcs banging at the doors as you need to protect one Rift or more. When the adventure begins, you don’t have much to approach this task with in general, but each level unlocks a new tool, be it a trap, a helpful minion, or the magic of the Weavers who let you pick mid-level upgrade paths to power your options up even further. Regardless of whether you’re playing level 1 or the final level on hard though, you’ll always be out there as the burly apprentice wizard at first needing to help with repelling the orcs as they break down the doors. The crossbow is going to be consistently useful the whole adventure, headshots able to kill regular enemies in one shot, and while they come in waves with plenty of foes to make even excellent aim not enough to stop all the baddies alone, it does give you a great way to thin the numbers before the opposition reaches your traps. You do get various forms of magic to use over time, the player needing time to recharge mana but the spells can be incredibly useful supplements to the hands-on action. A wind spell lets you shove orcs back to run over your traps all over again or even shove them into acid and lava pits, fire can quickly fry a small group in front of you, and ice magic in particular is great for freezing regular foes or immediately shattering flying fiends. While the end goal will be working towards traps doing more of the work, they do earn more money for you per kill after all, you do feel like you have a pretty good kit for fighting with and filling in where other killing options might fail you.
Your attacking options would be kind of basic if this was just an action game, but the traps are a crucial part of managing the incoming army as they will be too numerous to handle otherwise. The money you earn from killing orcs will go into building your traps, the player allowed to bring a small set into the level and needing to choose wisely based on the level layout. A stage with low ceilings will let you place crushers and giant swinging maces, an area with a lot of drops into acid are great for wall pushers, and tight corridors are great for clogging with floor traps. While each level giving you a new tool can lead to a few duds, you’ll definitely find an expanding group of options worth considering. Tar pits for example slow enemies, giving time for other nearby traps to activate. Barricades can be used to funnel foes down the paths you want them on, although curiously a few levels just have the orcs destroy them if you use them to block specific hallways with no clear reason why since usually they’ll only break them if they have no other way to move forward. You might settle into a few favorites over time certainly, but levels do start getting quite tough to try and incentivize more clever trap use, although minions can carry a lot of the weight as well. Archers and paladins can be placed to join in the fight, but orcs can kill them and everything has a proportional cost so stronger options can take more time to work towards.
Orcs Must Die! is very smart in how its levels progress in design, the player having to think more and more about not just where traps go but when they’ll be able to afford placing them down. There is a little time between each wave of orcs to sell or place traps as well as a few full on breaks per level where you can do so more calmly, but trying to attack enemies and manage traps can lead to some hectic but enjoyably involved play. The orcs are gradually joined by powerful allies as well, these new foes starting to throw monkey wrenches into your usually reliable mechanisms. Kobolds can sprint by so quickly your traps might not have time to reset between activations, flying imps can avoid groundbound traps, and ogres in particular can take a lot of punishment before going down. If you get too comfortable with one approach you’ll often find a new enemy thrown into the mix that requires you to work harder to protect that method, and even if you can hold them at bay, soon level designs really push back hard like ones with multiple far apart rifts with many halls leading to them. Portals usually exist to help you hop between far away parts of the battlefield so you won’t be able to blame something slipping your notice, especially with the map in the top right corner and voice warnings to help keep you alert of where the enemies are. You’ll know when you lose, even though it might have felt overwhelming, there was something you could have done if you had spaced out purchases and trap placement well, and with things like wind magic that are good for stalling if you really need to, it’s not like there is no way to make up for minor slip-ups.
The medieval rock soundtrack does fit the game’s hero well, and for players looking to get a little more out of the experience, each level can provide up to 5 skulls for doing well in them. 4 skulls can be rewarded based on the health of your Rift, a single orc slipping by enough to deny you one of the skulls and some really good trap management and personal orc slaying key to keeping the Rifts safe. The last skull though ties to a par time for a level, the player not needing to be too swift to earn the fifth skull but definitely needing to have a proper hold on countering a stage’s design to earn that last skull. Skulls aren’t just a ranking system though, as they go towards permanent upgrades to your traps. Some of these are simple cost reductions that definitely pay off in the long run, but others can give your tools new functions like the spike trap also slowing foes it pierces. It’s not just a matter of pride earning the skulls, and with upgrades also being a bit pricey, if you do want to make your favorite tools even better, you will need to become fairly skilled at the mix of tower defense and fighting. It won’t get too complex unless you try out the unlockable harder difficulty and that can admittedly make some levels blend together as you spend time headshotting orcs and waiting for them to walk into a standard trap arrangement you set up, but Orcs Must Die! does work at varying it up so it doesn’t become so samey it loses its deeper thrills.
THE VERDICT: Orcs Must Die!, especially with its delightfully dumb protagonist, sounds like it would just be some wanton bloodshed for the sake of it, but this game mixes its moments of involved orc slaying very well with its tower defense elements. You need to work to hold back the enemy tides until you can afford to put more and more of the work into the hands of your traps and minions, and even then you’ll need to be smart and responsive if you want to conquer some of the trickier level layouts. Sometimes Orcs Must Die! will boil down to standing in place headshotting the latest wave of standard foes as they wade through a simple trap set you figured out in the early levels, but it is the moments where the orc hordes ask you to be both smart and directly involved where you can extract some of the most exciting and memorable instances of the game elements coming together beautifully.
And so, I give Orcs Must Die! for PC…
A GOOD rating. Orcs Must Die! is a game I had played some of in the past, but I had stopped just short of completing the game’s first chapter of three. It wasn’t really out of distaste for the game, but it was also a case where it hadn’t really gotten its hooks into me to make me come back to see more. The later levels with the more demanding layouts do need to be worked up towards and even on a smaller scale you do have the gradual shift from being the main killing force to letting your traps handle more and more of it, but it is some of the built-in repetition that keeps Orcs Must Die! from ranking higher. Fighting the orcs yourself is always required to some degree but not always complicated, but it is also a key piece of the game’s tactical considerations. You can place traps and minions in spaces they will do their best work even if it means you need to thin the hordes and do a bit of clean-up until you can pull off the fully automated orc killing arrangements, and that system has its highs and lows. A desperate moment of repelling the stragglers that nearly reached your rift or trying to hold back the enemies that specifically target minions and barricades can add some nice flashpoints of tension, and since you’re not just relying fully on smart object placement you won’t be obnoxiously wracking your brain to earn a win. There are smart ideas in place like the skulls being so important for upgrades that you fight to perfect your approach without it being too difficult to earn them, pushing a player towards improvement without outright demanding it. It’s an effective mix of action and tower defense, Orcs Must Die! just needs to start exploring that combination a bit more to help it climb out of the occasional stretches of simple gameplay.
Orcs Must Die!’s name may give the impression of something focused on mindless bloodshed, but hands-on orc killing and tower defense play are a better pairing than you might initially expect. Tower defense games are often about placing down objects and letting them do all the work, and while you need to be smart where you place them, it’s hard to say literally sitting back and watching your towers do all the killing isn’t a bit of mindless action itself. Orcs Must Die! does know there needs to be some thought and a proper degree of pressure to make it all rewarding though, the player able to revel in the fruits of their labors because the most mindless moments are proof of how well your orc killing efforts are going.