The Digest:Take some dumb orcs mix in some of their friends and play defend the castle.  Orcs Must Die! does a fantastic job of mixing tower defense with a little third person shooting action that doesn’t take things too seriously.

THE FACT SHEET

RELEASE DATE: October 5, 2011
DEVELOPER: Robot Entertainment, Inc
ESRB RATING: “T” for Teen
GENRE: Strategy, Action

PRODUCT OVERVIEW:  “Orcs Must Die!” is a white-knuckle blend of action and strategy. 
Orcs Must Die! challenges players to defend fortresses under siege.  With a wide variety of traps and weapons to choose from, Orcs Must
Die! dares players to find the best ways to hack, launch, flatten,gibletize, and incinerate an endless army of filthy orcs and their vile
allies. Orcs Must Die! features a vibrant look, addictive gameplay, and a blatant disregard for the welfare of orc

PRODUCT FEATURES:  

• Play as the War Mage and defend 24 fortresses from an enraged mob of orcs and 11 other villainous monsters.
• Choose from a selection of 6 weapons and magic spells and 17 traps that hack, launch, flatten, gibletize, and incinerate your enemies.
• Upgrade your traps, spells and weapons to cater the game to your personal play style.
• Cleverly combine traps and spells for higher scores on the leaderboards.
• Expertly wield your wits and your weapons through the storydriven campaign and unlock a brutal “Nightmare” campaign.
• Replay fortresses endlessly, combining different defenses and tactics every time

    

Ahh killing orcs.  Isn’t it every mage’s passion to defend the rift and kill some orcs.  Orcs Must Die! starts you out with about as much story as you need to know.  You are a mage’s apprentice that gets called to duty and you get cool traps and you get to kill orcs to defend your rift.  Now if you want more story the developers have included a comic on their website and you can find it here.

The orcs are well dumb and what would you expect from orcs I’m sure they have small brains so all they know to do is smash through your door and charge forward trying to kill you on the way to your rift.  Now some levels have just one rift and some levels have multiple rifts.  That is where the game gets fun.  You do though get many items to help defend your rifts.

Orcs Must Die! gives you a variety of traps to help defend your rift.  You get your standard spiked floors that shoot up spikes when an orc runs over them.  You get arrow walls that will fire a flurry of arrows at any orc that is within range.  You also get spiked traps that will fall from the ceiling when an orc tries to run under them.  All of them cost a different amount of coin and each level starts you with a predetermined amount of coins.  Whenever you kill an orc you get coins.  Get a kill streak and you earn even more coins.  Not much deviation from the tower defense formula.  Until you consider our hero. 

The hero of the game is the mage’s apprentice who is thrown into action.  He is a caricature of a buff Charlie Sheen.  Throwing around terms like “winning”.  He provides a little comic relief but after a while his comments get a little stale and old.  But with the hero comes the difference of other tower defense games.  You can actually run around in third person and shoot the orcs yourself.  Or if you have some of the magical add-ons you can flame,freeze, or blow your way to victory.  My personal favorite is the flame powers.  You can basically lay down a flame wall and stand back and watch the orcs burn.  But each power you use drains your magic bar and if you are out of magic you have to switch to your trusty sword or crossbow.

The games level design is pretty good.  Most of the levels provide you with a good choke point to funnel the orcs through for easy death and destruction.  Other levels are more open and require finesse to kill all the orcs before they enter your rift.  Some levels provide free traps to help stop the orcs.  They range from a spiked log to a molten metal to free guardians.  Guardians are NPCs that will help defend your rift.  The archer guardians are very useful in defending against flying enemies.

The variety of enemies are good.  You don’t just kill orcs.  Because apparently the orcs found some buddies to help take your rift down.  You have a Gnoll Hunter who will hunt you and your guardians down and try to kill you.  And you have Ogres that are 5 times as strong as an orc.  You also have some flying dragons that can spit fire at you.  They aren’t much fun but they add to the strategy of which type of traps to choose to take them down.

The overall graphics are cartoonish but do the job well of conveying the overall fun factor of this game.  The enemies burning and getting squashed is pleasant as ever.

The game has no multiplayer concept and with the third person aspect I think it would have been a blast to co-op or play online with another person to take down some orcs.  I hope the developers can work this in if they ever create a sequel.

Conclusion: If you want to find a game that provides an addictive action and strategy together than this game is for you.  It is an arcade game at heart and great for just killing some time and taking out frustration on some orcs.  I gave it a 3 out of 5 but its probably closer to a 3.5 out of 5.

Single Player: 3/5 | Multi-Player: N/A

Special thanks to Robot Entertainment for providing us with a copy of this game for review.