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dkirschner's Orcs Must Die! (PC)
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| [June 15, 2012 03:03:46 AM]
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Bought this game partly due to recommendation from T and partly due to quirky and interesting take on tower defense. I'd played a couple levels for a Steam winter sale achievement back in January, and just fired it up proper the other day. Overall, I dunno, I'd give it a 3.5 of 5 or so, 7/10. It was enjoyable enough. I did like the silliness of it. Watching the orcs get shredded, spiked, chopped, lobbed into acid pits, etc. is endlessly amusing. The main character is a dimwitted apprentice and I found him quite funny at times. He talks a bit of story (which is pretty irrelevant except to drive home that he is an idiot) before/after each level, and later on some of his conversations with the bad guy are hilarious, particularly when she insults him and he says "oh, the old man (his master, before he died) used to tell me that!" Then she insults him again like "I will kill you and drink your blood!" and again he says his master used to tell him that...when he was drunk. Then she laments, "Oh if you only knew the pleasures we could have had." He says, "Hm, he never said that." I restarted the level to listen to it a couple times. With the presentation, trust me, it's funny.
The game wasn't as innovative as I'd thought it might be. Sure, it's tower defense from a third-person perspective. But I've played Sanctum (first-person but same idea). Sure, you unlock a new trap each level and you can upgrade them with skulls and choose your traps each level and purchase them with money...but I've played Plants vs. Zombies, which was way more interesting. Sure, you have to stop the orcish horde from getting to the rift, but that's tower defense. And sure, you have a weapon to shoot/swing and spells to cast, but that's every hack n slash game ever. All mashed together, this stuff is fun enough, but it doesn't have lasting appeal for me.
I found Orcs Must Die to be less strategic and more hectic. The game is a mouse-clicker. It'll wear your clicking finger down fast because you attack with your bow/polearm/spells as fast as you can click. Also, it is easy to be fairly single-minded about traps. I had a solid strategy that worked for 90% of the levels no problem, and I developed this strategy early on. Here are the Useful Traps: spike trap, ceiling crusher, springboard, archers. I'm pretty confident I can go back and beat the game with those alone. Then always keep on your wind belt, lightning ring, thunder ring, and use your bow. The springboard is probably my favorite. You just make a gauntlet of crushers and spike traps and fill any height position with archers...then do your best to put spring traps at the end and just launch the orcs back to the beginning of the gauntlet. I did so many levels without hardly firing my bow. Granted there is still a nightmare difficulty, but I've got no real motivation to try it. I had fun at the orc slaughter. Other traps I saw no use for. Like the swinging ball mace trap. It takes up the same # of squares and costs the same as 3 ceiling crushers, but the orcs have to walk through it as it's swinging. With the crushers, they just crush whoever walks under, period. Then there was a ballista...I don't even know what that does. Some air vents, don't see the point except to immobilize enemies a second. Why immobilize them when you could just kill them? So yea, some traps seemed overpowered, some seemed pointless.
There are also some annoying bugs. If you springboard enemies into lava, for example, there's a good chance that one will get stuck alive in the lava and it can be hard to find him and kill him to finish the level. It just sticks until you kill the orc who flew in the lava that should be dead anyway. I had a couple crashes to the desktop for no apparent reason. Sometimes you can't place traps on tiles that you should obviously be able to place traps on. Like for some unknown reason you just can't place over these 3 bricks and it ruins your symmetry. Archers also bugged out when I'd try to place them sometimes. They'd spawn in another location. The first time it happened I'd clicked like 5 times, then I found later this stack of 5 archers on the other side of the map. Weird.
Sooo, neat game, fun enough. My final word is don't bother with it unless you really like tower defense or you are really curious and want to play a quick pointless story with an amusing cast of characters, but there are way better tower defense games out there.
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dkirschner's Orcs Must Die! (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 13 June, 2012
GameLog closed on: Thursday 14 June, 2012 |
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