Whatever happened to the tower defence genre?

No, I’m serious. 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. 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. Then, abruptly, people seemed to lose interest; the genre didn’t exactly die, but the zeitgeist definitely moved elsewhere. 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. 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 time¹, the dedicated tower defence genre has pretty much been driven underground.

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. 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. 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. 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.

(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. 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.)

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. 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. 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. 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. The 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. Thinning out the horde with a grenade launcher or taking down a big tough ogre with a series of headshots can do a lot to relieve the pressure on your trap network, as most traps only fire periodically and have lengthy reload/reset times; on the other hand there’s far too many enemies for you to cope with on your own and so you need the traps to deal with the chaff while you focus your personal attention on the particularly juicy and/or annoying enemy types that might otherwise make it through to the rift.

More than that, though, is that Orcs Must Die! leverages the 3D-ness of its environment and the ground-level view that your character has to good effect when planning trap layouts. Most tower defence games revolve around using barricades to manipulate enemy paths and create chokepoints, and then focusing all of your firepower on those chokepoints to make sure nothing gets through. Orcs Must Die! is no different, but uses the additional dimension to allow you to place your traps on the floors, walls or ceilings. Since most types of trap can only be attached to one type of surface this adds an additional layer of experimentation as you try and figure out which combination of traps is most effective for maximising damage on a single tile — and the experimentation is very fun, as the traps are just as cartoonish as the violence they inflict and it’s quite satisfying to see them all go off at once and reduce an incoming group of orcs into a fine paste. The selection is almost entirely drawn from prior OMD favourites such as ceiling crushers, wall grinders and arrow traps, and there’s few actually new ones in here — I think it’s just the ceiling lasers and the bouncing buzzsaw traps that I haven’t seen before — but it’s been long enough since I last played that I’ve forgotten the optimal layouts for them, and I enjoyed figuring out the solutions all over again.

Yes, solutions plural. If you had it all your own way with the traps you’d be able to quickly come up with a one-size-fits-all killbox that effortlessly minced anything unwise enough to set foot inside it, but the level layouts and wave compositions do try and keep you on your toes here. Mostly you are constrained by funds, as Orcs Must Die! is very aware of just how incredibly powerful the ability to funnel orcs down a particular route with barricades is, and so makes barricades one of the most expensive items in the game. It’s not going to be possible to build enough of them to direct the orcs exactly where you want to go to start with, which is doubly awkward when most maps have two or more orc spawn points and thus two or more routes that they can take to your rift. So your tactics at the start of a level are very different from your tactics at the end of them, as you wage a sort of guerilla war against the orcs with a few scattered traps to soften them up while you backpedal furiously and shoot them in the face. Often you’ll be constrained by time, as enemy spawns from different spawn points will be staggered allowing you to clear them one at a time — if you can kill them fast enough, which usually requires intelligent trap placement to speed that process up a bit. Most maps — although not all — do eventually allow the construction of a nice killbox layout if you can survive the early stages. However, even after it’s operational you still have to be on your toes because there’s plenty of enemies that can destroy your barricades and some enemies that exclusively target them; the most panic-inducing event in Orcs Must Die! is hearing a group of kobold sappers spawn when you haven’t got any countermeasures set up, since that’s probably going to destroy whatever barricades you had blocking off an alternate route and give the orcs a clear run to your rift.

The thing is, except for the player character being down in the world watching the orcs get pulverised up close, none of this is particularly out of the ordinary for a tower defence game — and more to the point, none of it is any different from what previous Orcs Must Die! games have done, even to the point of recycling nearly all of the enemy types, weapons, and traps. Aside from it being the most modern game and thus having the nicest graphics, does Orcs Must Die! 3 actually do anything new to try and justify its existence? Well, yes, although as usual when you find a proven winning formula it’s the new stuff bolted onto the side that’s the weakest part of the game. Obviously there’s a new story, and new playable characters, and obviously these are all terrible because no tower defence game has ever had a good story and Orcs Must Die! is particularly obnoxious about it. But the headline new gameplay feature for Orcs Must Die! 3 is a little more interesting: a new type of level called a War Scenario.

The base levels of Orcs Must Die! are relatively small and contained affairs, since 1) the player has to be able to move around inside them easily and 2) the first game had to run on the Xbox 360, which by modern standards had about the same amount of processing power as a moderately-sized potato. Technology has come on a little way since then, though, and since even this upgraded version of the game isn’t that graphically demanding there’s now scope to push the level design rather further than was possible back in 2011. This is what the War Scenarios do: these are huge levels that take whole minutes to run across (which is why there’s handy teleporters scattered around for quick movement) and whose spawn points vomit forth hundreds upon hundreds of orcs in each wave. To counter this you have access to special War Scenario-only “traps”, which actually take the form of squads of archers and paladins who will move out to engage the enemy once they get within a certain distance, as well as turrets that you can hop into to bombard them as they make their approach. Once you’ve progressed far enough in a War Scenario to have a few of these set up it all gets appropriately apocalyptic with a frontline of knights dueling ogres while flaming arrows arc overhead from the archers you put up on the battlements. Credit where credit is due, when they’re firing on all cylinders the War Scenarios look absolutely phenomenal.

The problem here, though, is that while the knights and archers and turrets and the big comedy flipper trap that you also get will dispose of a lot of orcs, they won’t get all of them. To kill the stragglers you’ll need to deploy a backline of regular, bog-standard traps as well, and if you pay attention you’ll notice that these regular traps are actually much more effective at killing the orcs than the special War Scenario ones, for all that there’s now ten times as many of them charging at you. This is to be expected, when you think about it, since when you are playing a tower defence game you are essentially building a miniature factory to process incoming enemies into chunky giblets. Efficiency and throughput capacity is key — finding the trap combo that will kill the largest number of orcs for the smallest outlay in terms of money spent on traps. Most traps in Orcs Must Die aren’t single target and hit all orcs on a tile, and they’ll do the same damage to each orc whether there’s one of them or a hundred of them. Yes, most traps have lengthy reset times and yes, some traps have charges which big hordes of orcs can quickly deplete, so it’s not like having many monsters charge you all at once is an insignificant consideration, but the whole point of the regular levels is that you should be building trap layouts that can cope with a lot of orcs at once – and past a certain density of orcs the scaling ceases to really matter. If efficiency is all you care about, then it is much more effective to take the vast amount of money the War Scenarios throw at you (those knights are pretty expensive) and instead spend it on a bunch of barricades, tar traps and laser curtains, just as you would in a normal level. Then you just have to make sure the barricades don’t get blown up by the kobold sappers and that’s the level won.

So the War Scenarios end up being a bit of a gimmick rather than a genuinely new and interesting way to play. This is disappointing, especially since Orcs Must Die! 3 doesn’t have a huge amount of novelty to fall back on besides this; as mentioned there’s a few new weapons and traps, but these are sufficiently anonymous that I couldn’t actually tell you what they are off the top of my head. There are, as far as I can tell, no new enemy types (except maybe the armoured ogre).  There is the Scramble game mode, which is Robot’s attempt to provide some long-term replayability beyond Endless mode; here you progress through a series of five randomly-chosen maps, choosing between a selection of helpful permanent buffs and rather severe debuffs as you complete each one. It feels a little bit lightweight, because it is, but it’s still a welcome addition because a single Endless mode game can last for upwards of ninety minutes and you can at least shut the game down between Scramble mode maps and come back to your run later. It’s not exactly what I’d call a major selling point, though.

No, if you’re looking for an answer to the question “Why play Orcs Must Die! 3 over Orcs Must Die! 2?” then it’s probably to be found in a couple of seemingly minor fixes to game systems that result in huge quality of life improvements. Firstly the absolutely infuriating skull currency system has been (somewhat) fixed up: the short version of this is that completing levels rewards you with skulls, which you then use to unlock new traps and upgrade existing ones. As you can only slot so many traps at once and upgrading a trap to max level is expensive, the choices you make when investing your skulls really do matter since they essentially count as your skill spec. Obviously you might want to experiment by changing that spec at any time, but Orcs Must Die! 2 made this incredibly awkward by only giving you a button that refunded all skulls spent across all traps — so if you tried out a new trap and decided it wasn’t for you, the only way to get those skulls back was to delete your entire trap spec and start again from scratch. Needless to say this sucked tremendously — enough so that a large portion of my OMD 2 review was spent bitching about it — and thankfully OMD 3 adds an intermediate level of granularity in the form of a button that lets you refund all skulls spent on a single trap instead of all skulls spent across all traps, which makes experimentation far easier and keeps my blood pressure at a pleasingly low level.

The other thing it does is makes respawns instant after player death. This is both a good and bad thing and is going to be an excuse for me to segue into the game’s curious lack of polish in just a moment, but for now let’s focus on the good part: all monsters in Orcs Must Die! will attempt to kill the player if they get close enough, but if you stay at a distance and pepper them with arrows or grenades then you only have to worry about a particular subset that possess ranged attacks. There’s a couple of variants of orc archer who can certainly be annoying, especially if they’re hidden behind (and are shooting through) a huge mass of regular orcs that prevent return fire, but most of my opprobrium is reserved for the Cyclops Mage, who fires homing magical projectiles that track you forever and are very difficult to avoid. I would say that nine out of ten of my deaths in Orcs Must Die! are down to Cyclops Mages sniping me, and in the second game this drove me up the wall because I never saw it coming and the respawn delay after these random deaths often meant doom for an Endless run. It didn’t feel like a thing that was really within my control to manage and so it was very frustrating, and I’m happy that Orcs Must Die! 3 removes the time penalty for dying beyond a short walk from the spawn back to wherever the frontline is.

What surprises me here, though, is how little flair it displays when it does this. There’s no respawn effect besides a voice line from whatever character you’re playing — your avatar just pops back into existence next to your rift like they’ve been placed there by a console command; in fact the whole experience feels very much like I have some sort of developer debug mode on to make testing easier. There’s several other areas where it feels like five minutes of polish would have gone a very long way, too. For example, your character does a stupid dance on clearing a level (don’t ask, I’m just grateful they’re not flossing) but if you’re playing co-op with somebody else you’ll notice they’re doing exactly the same dance, perfectly synchronised. If they’re so hell-bent on having six playable characters in this game, why not differentiate them a bit by having them do different dances? It doesn’t seem like a huge amount of overhead to add at least one more to make you and your co-op partner’s characters a bit less obviously generic clones of one another, but it hasn’t happened for some reason. Other animations are conspicuous by their absence too; when you get targeted by gnoll assassins, who don’t respect the normal rules of the map and come straight at you like a hairy homing missile, if they encounter a barricade along the way they’ll just slide right over it like this legendarily terrible effect from the Star Wars special edition. Would it have killed Robot to add a little jump animation, maybe? Even the music doesn’t escape from this vaguely slapdash feeling — the victory screen music is the same awful 10 second jingle on a loop, which remains relatively inoffensive right up until your co-op partner decides they want to spend five minutes deciding which new traps to unlock, which leaves you stuck on this screen unable to progress while your brain starts to slowly dribble out of your ears.

All this stuff perhaps wouldn’t be so eyebrow-raising if Orcs Must Die! 3 had only just come out — these are exactly the sort of corners I’d expect to be cut in order to get the game out of the door, and individually they’re really very minor issues. Unfortunately while OMD 3 has only just come out on Steam, it’s been out on Stadia for over a year now. This additional development time has at least ensured that stability-wise it’s as solid as a rock — no bugs that I could see, and zero connection or network issues throughout a full co-op campaign playthrough, which is quite remarkable given the new normal of publishers unhesitatingly pushing broken games out of the door because they know people will buy them regardless — but it’s still disappointing that it didn’t also manifest a little of this sorely-needed polish.  I could also choose to be disappointed that Orcs Must Die! 3 does so little to move things forward from where Orcs Must Die! 2 previously left them, as it’s almost identical in spite of the graphical upgrade and the new characters and the War Scenarios. But, as I said in the opener, I’m going to choose instead to be happy that Orcs Must Die! 3 got made at all; after Unchained flopped and the tower genre defence in general got subsumed into other games I figured I wouldn’t see another one. Given that, I think it’s acceptable for OMD 3 to be an unambitious yet solid return to the series; if Robot do the same thing again for the fourth one I’m going to be significantly less forgiving, but for now my verdict is that it’s a perfectly fine game.

The post Thoughts: Orcs Must Die! 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yeah, I’m basically reviewing Orcs Must Die 2 just so that I can do that pun. I have dragooned my regular co-op partner Kenti into helping me out with this one. Say hello, Kenti.

Kenti: Hello there. I play games with other humans.

Hentzau: But only humans. Because you hate computers. You’re a computer…cist.

Kenti: It’s true. Sometimes when my voice synthesizer doesn’t work I refuse to talk to the humans. They must intimate my intent purely from the actions of my on-screen characters. This occasionally makes Hentzau swear and complain about being lonely. (So the plan is working perfectly).

Hentzau: Yes, for my part I don’t hate computers. I just hate you. However, I also hate orcs. Oh, how I hate them.

Kenti: They must die. It is the only way.

Hentzau: Indeed they must. In quite prodigious — one might even say extravagant — quantities. The original Orcs Must Die provided for this particular vice quite admirably, but it nevertheless fell short in several ancillary areas, consisting as it did of a simple linear campaign with no challenge levels or multiplayer or anything. Once you were done with the campaign then bam, that was it. No real reason to go back. It was functional, it was enjoyable, but it definitely felt like it could do with a bit of fattening up to provide a more comprehensive orc-slaying experience.

Kenti: I think it is fair to say that after playing the first iteration, both of us agreed emphatically on the fact that the cherry on top of this murder cake had to be some form of multiplayer. It did clearly feel like an iteration, the development team’s first shot across the bow to stretch their game development muscles.

Hentzau: For me it wasn’t so much the lack of multiplayer as the complete absence of any sort of survival/high score mode. That both are present in the sequel is a sure sign that Robot Entertainment were aware that the first iteration of OMD was very much the Lite version of the game. The sequel feels like the full release.

Kenti:*protracted silence*

Hentzau: Let’s talk about the co-op first, shall we?

Kenti: Yes. Because for me that was definitely the most attractive and exciting of the new features. I was satisfied enough by the first OMD’s proof of concept, but this, I was sure, would make the fun pop out in glorious 3D. I think it did – there is always a certain amount of extra fun that co-operative play always adds, but unlike some of the games we have played together, it didn’t actively work to subtract that fun. Although I have enjoyed playing the other modes alone, I think co-op stands as the more complete experience. Not to say that there wasn’t something missing in the tactics department. When alone, you get a large number of slots to equip gadgets in, when playing co-operatively, you get just over half the slots each.

Hentzau: In theory this should promote intelligent trap selection with each player taking traps, trinkets and weapons that’ll complement the other player’s traps and abilities. However, I at least found it didn’t quite work out that way thanks to both an incredibly irritating UI decision that I’ll go into more depth on later (you have no idea how I am going to go into depth on this) and the difficulty of coordinating some good synergies when your voice communication is only going one way. EH KENTI.

Kenti: Your turmoil pleases my circuits greatly. I think on the first two thirds of the levels we maybe communicated on trap choices once. The last few levels did require us to think a little more about how we were individually and collectively going to tackle the challenge – I wanted to feel that from map 3 or 4. Perhaps that is necessary for the hardest difficulty level (Nightmare), but one would expect it to feature more in the co-op play of the standard difficulty level.

Hentzau: Most of my objections to OMD 2 arise not from the gameplay itself, but from the way the metagame elements are set up. Here, you have the problem that — with the sole exception of two levels near the end — all the campaign levels are pathetically easy for two players to complete. Having an extra pair of hands available to help stem the green tide flooding towards your rift makes a huge difference. The thing here is that while Nightmare mode is genuinely harder, with far more enemies and enemy types, it doesn’t unlock until you’ve completed the game on normal. This is puzzling to me; rather than give you the option to get murdered on a higher difficulty level from the outset if you really want to, OMD 2 instead forces you to splash around in the kiddie pool for six hours no matter how good you actually are at the game.

Kenti: Orcs Must Die, but at a measured and manageable pace. There must be some sort of Orc Murder Control Agency.

Hentzau: In order to qualify for your grown-up orc-killing licence you first have to pass the game’s version of a cycling proficiency test. Quite frankly if you hadn’t been around to poke me through co-op I think I might just have stayed in Endless mode. Except of course I couldn’t, because a lot of the trap unlocks are also linked to progression in the campaign. You basically have to play it in order to get the most out of the other modes. It’s more than a little bit obnoxious.

Kenti: That’s not to say that co-op wasn’t fun, at least in my case. I found it an incredibly enjoyable process and it certainly rates high in the Championship of Co-operative Games.

Hentzau: For the host, anyway.

Kenti: It is not my fault that my pristine broadband tubes are far superior to those a fleshling can install in themselves. Put some optics in your toes: then you can host.

Hentzau: My connection woes had sod-all to do with my internet, which runs literally every other co-op experience under the sun with a minimum of fuss. I am therefore forced to point the finger of blame for the game’s second-plus lag times, teleporting ogres, ice-skating orcs and regular disconnects squarely at OMD 2’s netcode. Maybe it was just me and everyone else is having a wonderful time with it, but as the non-host half of this partnership it put a significant damper on my co-op experience since it pretty much ensured I couldn’t rely on weapons. Like, at all. Couldn’t hit a thing with them; the crossbow headshot system is amazingly crap anyway but this basically reduced things to “fire randomly at horde at roughly head height, hope for the best”. There were even a couple of times where I had to query you as to whether or not my traps were working because I simply couldn’t tell.  It wasn’t impressive.

Kenti: So what has OMD2 added to the actual gameplay itself? Apparently more environmental traps, including the largely autonomous minecarts whizzing around the earlier levels and the player-activated spike-rollers, mine-carts full or hot coals and so forth. These are placed strategically across levels to give you just that little bit of an advantage against the relentless tide. Great! But they aren’t really useful for your typical destructive needs – they are not as reliable and conveniently located as traps you can place yourself, nor are they as precise as your personal attention to orc death – you can’t be sure it will take care of the problem. I ended up relying on traps I could place and spells I could shoot, the environmental traps were a curiosity and little more.

Hentzau: I think part of the problem here is that the pressure the orc hordes were exerting on us never got to the point where we needed the extra edge the environmental traps provided. They’re simply not necessary, and so while the automated minecarts are a nice little bonus the rest of the environment features went unused

Kenti: Even when the situation does get high pressured — such as on Endless — either I had the autonomous carts help thin out the hordes, or I had no time to set up the shots at the right time for a questionable amount of orc damage.

Hentzau: I’ve made good use of certain well-placed boulder traps and rolling logs on Endless, but on the whole I agree with you. Even the minecarts hinder more than they help, with the tracks taking up valuable floorspace and the carts themselves exploding your painstakingly-positioned boom barrels if they so much as graze them.

Kenti: They have also given us more placeable traps and weapons. There are some new traps that only the new character, the Sorceress, can use such as the Acid Trap or Ice Vent. I certainly found these more interesting than some of the more basic traps of the original (the War Mage still gets the original Arrow Trap and Tar Pit) and they formed the core of my arsenal against the orcs. The new Scepter of Domination was also great fun as it allowed me to briefly convert an orc to my control and cause them to explode in a deadly manner if killed. Entertaining AND a lifesaver. There were also general new traps such as the Haymaker (placed on the ceiling and invited to thrash orcs about in a circular manner) and…

Hentzau: Does this mean I can talk about SKULL REFUND ARMAGEDDON now?

Kenti: Er… go ahead. I’ll go grab a drink of oil. Is that what they put inside machines?

Hentzau: Okay, so, the Weavers from the first game have been defenestrated and replaced with the skull currency system. For the sequel you give your traps passive upgrades by spending skulls you earn through the simple process of playing the game. Skulls are earned through killing x number of orcs, surviving y number of waves, and finishing the level in z amount of time with Ω rift points remaining. In order to be fully effective as a War Mage/Sorceress you need enough skulls to fully upgrade ten traps/weapons/trinkets, which I think works out to about 250 in total. This takes a while, and makes the initial stages of OMD 2 a somewhat grindy system, but I don’t think it’s a bad change. It’s a change that I actually endorse, on the whole, since it means that even a failed Endless attempt will give you some skulls for your trouble.

Kenti: The upgrade system does add a little bit of extra faff that is usually a good break from the action. It’s the same reason that people like equipping things in RPGs or getting new guns or whatever else. You get to make your traps a little more effective, get slightly different effects from your weapons and generally do things a bit differently.

Hentzau: Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. If that’s how it had actually turned out, I would have zero problem with the system whatsoever. Unfortunately the entire thing is undone by one of the biggest own goals I can remember seeing in a recent game. The skull system is supposed to promote experimentation and a lot of testing traps together to find out what fits and which trap/weapon combos will lead to high scores and big bucks. The developers have made some provision for a player who tries out a new trap, decides he doesn’t like it, and wants some way to get back the skulls he invested in upgrading it. At any time, and as many times as you like, you can refund the skulls you spent putting new bells and whistles on your orc grinding machine.

Except, in a truly baffling example of a developer making things difficult for the player for no other reason than because they can, you can’t refund the skulls spent on just one trap. Oh no. That would be too simple. If you want those skulls back then you have to block refund everything. All the skulls you ever spent on every single trap you spent them on; if you hit that refund button your entire setup ends up totally erased. If you decide to try out the new Void Wall trap only to find it wanting and now want to put those skulls back into the Boom Barrel Dispenser, you have to wipe your entire finely-tuned trap spec out of existence and then spend five minutes trying to remember exactly where you spent those 250-odd skulls all over again. It’s such a pain to do this every single time you want to try out a new trap that it actively discourages experimentation and tinkering with different trap combos. I can’t think of a good reason why Robot would decide to do this, except maybe that they secretly hate everyone who buys their games and did it out of sheer spite.

Kenti: Now, either someone up the design chain didn’t think this through, or (knowing how development works) there was some sort of technical issue that prevented it being done the sane and sensible way. Not excusable though, because the end product simply discourages you from experimenting too much and thus tentatively keeps you away from a higher orc-murder count. The Orc Murder Control Agency strikes again?

Hentzau: I mean the actual gameplay part of OMD 2 is outstanding, it’s just that whenever you’re outside that the game is hell-bent on making things as difficult for you as possible. As I said, it’s utterly baffling to me why they would do this.

Kenti: Monsters! It’s not just orcs. We’ve been lying to you this whole dieorcblog. As in the first OMD, you get to kill things that are not orcs and they are not as optional as the name might suggest. There are the old ogres, kobolds, gnolls and the like as well as the new Earth Elementals, Trolls, Gnoll Grenadiers and Shamans. All of which are really really annoying in a positive way, pushing you to work that extra bit harder to destroy all things that are not you. Earth Elementals shatter into progressively smaller versions of themselves, trolls have predictable but really really annoying regeneration and Shamans… what do shamans do? I remember killing them but they never once upset the acid cart.

Hentzau: Shamans periodically resurrect any recently killed baddie that you haven’t gibbed to full health. This includes super-baddies like Armoured Ogres and Mountain Trolls, so they can potentially be a massive pain if left to their own devices.

Kenti: Ah. I think most of my eradication methods involve the utter disintegration of the subject in question. Robot efficiency you see.

Hentzau: I like most of the new monster additions. They keep you on your toes; elemental mitosis has to be dealt with in a controlled fashion, trolls must be burned or frozen to halt their regenerative abilities and the shamans… well, you just shoot those first.

Kenti: The flyers are still pointless though. They were just a nuisance that you either had to take care of personally or appoint lots of archer guardians to deal with in OMD and in OMD2… that’s pretty much the same. They don’t really add a good challenge, they have wings and you just make sure to kill them off and that’s that.

Hentzau: Eh, I found that while flyers were present they weren’t particularly overused, and all but the ice bats could be one-shotted by a blast of the ice amulet. Where monsters are concerned I reserve my ire for the cyclops mage, who I think must have been coded by the same guy responsible for skull refunds and the difficulty progression. Cyclops mages are very tough, fire homing missiles that will always hit you unless you get out of range (and they have a very long range), count as large monsters so they can’t be flipped or pushed into acid, and have tiny tiny heads making the freeze/headshot combo used to down most large enemies entirely useless. They are utterly unfun to fight and the only enemy I’d be entirely happy to never encounter again.

Kenti: Tell you what though – the story is absolutely roaring. There are trial, tribulations, problems that our brave protagonist and anti-hero must overc-

Hentzau: Oh be quiet. OMD 2 wisely doesn’t waste any time on a plot beyond “The Sorceress somehow survived and the War Mage is still a boorish dick, and together they kill orcs,” and the game is better for it.

Kenti: It is present but discreet. What little script they have written aims for levity and that’s just fine.

Hentzau: In the main, though, OMD 2 really is just a collection of well-designed orc killing boxes, something that’s particularly emphasised in Endless mode. Endless mode is, for me, the meat of any tower defence game, in which you set up the best system of traps you possibly can and have it gradually tested to destruction by ever-increasing hordes of baddies. It’s here that most of the trap experimentation really becomes necessary (although it’s still a massive pain) as each level requires a different set of traps to maximise your killing potential. My most recent discovery is that arrow traps will set off boom barrels from boom barrel dispensers, allowing you to instantly carpet bomb an area using the trap reset trinket power. Prior to that I was trying to perfect a spring trap/wall void combo to basically automatically toss the orcs into a black hole as they walked past it. This playing with different layouts and setups is, to me, the reason tower defence games exist, and the addition of Endless mode means it’s something that OMD finally caters for.

Kenti: Endless feels like a good challenge/puzzle and I can see myself working away at perfecting the orc-killing grids for some time. If that’s not quite enough to satisfy your orcs-be-gone needs, you can also play though the Classic levels from OMD if you also own OMD. I’ve been enjoying tackling them as the Sorceress as they present a slightly different challenge in this than they did in OMD – they are genuinely worth replaying.

Kenti: In the field of tower-defense hybrids it is certainly now the king sitting atop a mountainous throne of orc corpses. Sanctum was an excellent proof of the concept but it was dry and lifeless, sticking too rigidly to the conventions of the classic tower defense genre. Dungeon Defenders, although it went for the ‘cheery’ approach to its graphics and tone was all too obsessed with the loot rather than the levels and creative solutions to the orc problem. OMD’s aesthetic treatment is far more preferable too, being easier on the eye and softer on the ear, the only thing that OMD 2 doesn’t have that was great in Dungeon Defenders is bosses. Even there I am in two minds over just how much fun that actually added to the latter.

Hentzau: For my part II find OMD 2 to be a far more comprehensive experience compared to the first game. It still has some room for improvement/additional content via DLC or expansion packs (although if they don’t make patching out the absurd all-or-nothing skull refund system their first order of business those are very definitely going to remain unbought) but otherwise it feels pretty much done this time around.

Kenti: Would I disappoint and hurt you by saying that they have released the first patch already and they haven’t improved the skull refund issue?

Hentzau: That was a hotfixy patch. I expect it to be in the first proper patch they release, or there’s going to be trouble.

Kenti: I am sad this causes you no pain.

Hentzau: The skull refund system causes me pain, Kenti, and when I say “there’s going to be trouble” there what I actually mean is that I’m going to delete the game and then retire to my room to weep over a Diet Coke as I consider the intrinsic cruelty of the world and everything in it.

Kenti: Good enough for me.

The post Dieorcblog: Orcs Must Die 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

And die they do; by the hundreds – by the thousands – they trudge slowly into the maw of a nightmarish trap network where they are cut, stabbed, sliced, shot, sprung, burned, bashed, poisoned and drugged. Kobolds try to scurry over and under but get bogged down in treacle-like tar. Ogres attempt to smash their way through only to wander over a trapped floor panel which springs them back to the start of the gauntlet (or, if it’s available, into some acid). And any Gnolls who successfully hunt down their chief tormentor tend to find him standing under a giant swinging mace that inexplicably misses him and gibs them.

This spectacular array of carnage forms the centrepiece of Orcs Must Die. I found the real pleasure of this game was in building the most Heath Robinson-esque system of traps to funnel those poor orcs into something particularly choppy or burny – my masterpiece so far is the citadel where an elaborate system of spring and pusher traps bounced them down the tower level by level until they plopped into the lava at the bottom. The physics traps are by far the best thing about it but the others also put in a strong showing along with the environmental hazards; levels are littered with ambient traps like acid pots, spiked logs and even chandeliers which can be dropped onto the orcs’ heads if shot. It all combines to produce a truly wondrous harmony of violence that, when the game gets it right, has been one of my better gaming experiences this year.

Unfortunately the developers keep trying to present me with a challenge by limiting my funds or where I can put my traps, which is ironic because even on Nightmare mode Orcs Must Die is fundamentally a very easy game. Is there a chokepoint in the level? If not, create one with barricades. Then set up a swinging mace above some tar and/or some wall blades. This will instantly kill everything except for ogres in one hit, and the war mage’s innate combat abilities are generally enough to see him through until he has the funds to build this setup. Unless the player is particularly anal about getting five stars on every level it makes completing them trivial once the relevant traps are unlocked, so I don’t understand this unnecessary focus on challenge when what the game should have been doing was presenting me with new and interesting ways to kill orcs. There aren’t anywhere near enough stages with lava or acid pits or high drops where the pusher traps are useful, and Endless/Sandbox modes are also conspicuous by their absence.

So as much as I enjoyed the fun levels there’s too many awkward ones in the mix where I was forced to rely on my mage shooting things himself rather than the traps, which is far less interesting to me since the combat pretty much consists of running backwards while clicking the left mouse button really really fast. It’s a bit of a fundamental misstep in the design; I’m given this great toolbox for killing orcs yet the geometry of the levels and the pricing of the traps means I don’t get to use 70% of it. Orcs Must Die is a nice idea, but it’s one I wish the developers had thought through a little bit more before putting into practice.

The post Thoughts: Orcs Must Die. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.