12/27/2023 0 Comments Orcs must die 3 skullsThe unique spin Orcs Must Die! puts on the tower defence concept - aside from the comedy physics of using flipper traps to fling orcs into bottomless pits - is that you’re also down in the thick of the action yourself, controlling an avatar who can blast the orcs via standard third-person shooter gameplay. Placing traps costs money, which you get back by killing orcs and clearing waves and then reinvest into making your gauntlet of traps even more vicious. Each enemy that makes it into the rift depletes the rift’s health, and if the rift hits zero HP you lose the level, so you need to stop them by deploying an array of traps that alternately slow, debilitate and inflict bloody, bloody violence on the ever-growing horde of orcs trying to reach the rift. Orcs Must Die! sticks to the standard tower defence formula of having waves of baddies appear at one or more spawn points and slowly run down a predictable, predetermined route to a target zone, which in this case is a magical rift. I’ve reviewed both prior OMD games on this blog, but that was some time ago so I’ll just briefly go over the basics. For once, though, I’m going to let that slide it’s been nine years, after all, and I’d rather play an only-slightly-updated version of a thing that I enjoyed than not have anything to play at all.) (Of course this is to be expected since Orcs Must Die! 3 is literally just Orcs Must Die! 2 again with a few extra bells and whistles attached. I’ve played Robot Entertainment’s other games and they weren’t really up to much, but they were definitely good at this one particular thing, and I am pleased to report that Orcs Must Die! 3 handily demonstrates that they’ve still got it. Some might call this shallow however, I don’t think anyone who has played it would deny that it is fun - fun enough that it’s somewhat baffling to me that it’s been almost a decade since the last proper Orcs Must Die! title. OMD has never been particularly interested in complex systems the way that some tower defence games can be, preferring to focus instead on the comedy violence of a never-ending stream of orcs, ogres and other nasties being flung bodily into lava pits or smashed by big ceiling crushers. This is why I’m very happy to see the return of the Orcs Must Die! series after it took an extremely ill-judged detour into the realms of free-to-play with Orcs Must Die! Unchained. Tower defence games are old news, and while you can still find them if you know where to look - games like Dungeon Warfare are perfectly decent if you’re willing to accept the lower production values - and while tower defence elements might crop up in other games from time to time 1, the dedicated tower defence genre has pretty much been driven underground. If, in 2011, making a tower defence game was the cool indie thing to be doing, then in 2021 it’s making a Slay The Spire ripoff, or a roguelike, or something combining the two. Then, abruptly, people seemed to lose interest the genre didn’t exactly die, but the zeitgeist definitely moved elsewhere. In a relatively short space of time we got games like Plants vs Zombies, Sanctum, Defense Grid, reverse tower defence in the form of Anomaly: Warzone Earth (that one wasn’t very good) and Defender’s Quest’s spin on it, where your “towers” were actually a collection of RPG-style heroes complete with special abilities. As somebody who loves tower defence games, nothing could have been more pleasing to me than the mini-boom in tower defence games from around 2009 through to 2012. Whatever happened to the tower defence genre?
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