After a year of Google Stadia exclusivity, Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die! 3 has finally been released on PC and console. At its core, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a tower defence game but played in the third person, where you play as one of two student war mages in a fantasy world who has to essentially defend the magic “rift” in each level against an oncoming onslaught of orcs and their brethren.
Each monster that manages to enter your rift reduces your rift points. When your points hit zero, you lose! After placing your traps and entering the ‘action’ phase of actually seeing your strategy succeed or fail in an equally glorious manner, you are very much in amongst the fray. You run around dealing with any of the monsters who may have managed to evade your traps (with a variety of long-range or up-close-and-personal weapons) and planting new traps as you go along.
In my case, this latter element is usually a frantic affair, tidied up considerably and reorganised between the oncoming waves of baddies.
As you complete levels, you earn upgrade ‘skulls,’ with which you can improve the current traps and weapons in your arsenal or purchase new orc-killing machines between levels, and so on. The campaign begins with just a couple of different types of orc lumbering towards the level’s rift, but then things start to really ramp up from the third level of the standard campaign onward. You begin to get faster enemies, like the kobolds, who can run over/past a number of traps with ease, and much larger baddies, like ogres, who can withstand a fair few beatings before admitting defeat/rolling over and dying.
The traps in your toolbox are as inventive as ever and range from the trusty ‘spike trap’ and ‘arrow wall’ to the more outlandish ‘ceiling pounder’ and ‘saw blade launcher’! After all this time, it was still immense fun inflicting pain on the enemy in various ways, hearing them scream in terror, get electrocuted, or burn to a frazzle. All very much cartoon fun, mind you. We’re talking Wile E. Coyote stuff here.
There’s a lot of strategy involved here, too. While it’s very easy to just level up the spike and arrow wall traps, cover the floors and walls in them, and hope for the best, that won’t work for every monster that is thrown at you. Equally, you only have a limited supply of cash with which to buy traps, so you have to think carefully. Otherwise, it won’t take long before you’re overrun.
It’s also a game that rewards repeat playing of levels to max out your upgrade skulls, and there’s a lot to enjoy about that, too. Returning to lower levels after you’ve increased the power and potency of your traps to really show the bad guys who’s boss!
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A standard, ever-increasing difficulty story campaign is present, which now includes much larger-scale war scenarios that take you out of the castle walls and see you battling against huge numbers of orcs. Those scenarios also come with their own specific traps that deal out damage on a massive scale.
There’s also an extra free story campaign that unlocks on completion of the original story, a locked Scramble mode that sees you battle the orcs across five random levels (unlocked once you complete level 12 of the original campaign), an Endless mode that sees you battle wave after, well, endless wave of orcs until you lose all your rift points, and a Weekly Challenge section. Multiplayer co-op mode is also available. Tie all that in with the high replay factor; there is much to get out of this game.
I tested the game out on Xbox, and as hinted at earlier, it can get a bit chaotic—and frustrating—mid-battle when trying to be precise with trap placement using a joypad. It’s far easier and more precise when using a mouse on PC. The early tutorials could be a bit more in-depth, maybe walk you through a level and the controls in more detail before letting you run riot on your own. A lot came flooding back to me due to having played OMD! 2, but players coming to the series fresh might not pick it up as quickly.
Also, there is a story here, and it’s a lighthearted affair, but I don’t remember much of it. It’s not really necessary, though, it’s nice to have, thematically. All you need to know is that orcs… well… must die! Or you lose.
Minor issues aside, though, the Orcs Must Die! series continues providing vast fun and enjoyment in this third (OK, fourth) outing. Has it been worth the wait? Absolutely. Grab it and kick ten shades of sushi out of some orc butt!
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