REVIEW : Orcs Must Die! 3 (PC)
As a new wave of orcs attacks your defences, you’ll occasionally hear a melancholy greenskin groan on the breeze: “Feels like we’ll never get there.” It appears to be a realisation about their doomed role in tower defence, but it’s a thought they never get to finish: they’re dashed against the rocks, tarred and burned, or electrified to the point where their bones glow through their skin.
Orcs Must Die! 3 isn’t usually an intelligent fantasy game, recently released from Stadia’s clutches. It makes little effort to contextualise its villainous title characters, to consider where they came from or why they do what they do.
It is, however, a thinking person’s game a strategic siege simulator that rewards meticulous planning inventive solutions, as well as a willingness to throw away prior assumptions and tackle a problem from a new viewpoint. It’s a game that makes you feel intelligent even as you feverishly swing your mouse to slug an imp in the eye with a bolt of magic.
Consider yourself an interior designer in a world where one of the pillars of feng shui is murder. Using pre-allocated money, you begin each level by purchasing, rotating, and putting traps of your choosing in a small dungeon to cause as much harm as possible to any orcs who come through.
Then it’s an open house: the doors slam inward, and adversaries dash along the hall and up the stairs, demonstrating a startling lack of hazard perception as they do so. The traps they set are from the Tom & Jerry school of slapstick comedy, flipping orcs into the air or stinging them with beehives; fans looking forward to the next Jackass reunion will be well served. After that, with all the orcs dead or absconding via the portal you’re supposed to be guarding, you start over, building out your designs until the last wave.
In a classic tower defence game, the arrival of the action phase would be your cue to sit back, take in the scene, and grit your teeth—hoping your walls will hold, and dropping an extra turret or two when funds allow. It’s time to roll up your gown sleeves, and dive into Orcs Must Die! 3.
It’s entertaining to fire into the swarm, looking for headshots among your varied sized opponents as though playing vertical whack-a-mole. The most excellent secondary fire options are freeze bombs and a sweeping knockback that causes a nostalgic round of ragdolling.
Overall, combat is best described as mash and peas, with an emphasis on button-mashing melee and peashooter projectiles. As a result, there’s less intricacy and room for skill than in a specialised action game—no there’s Souls-style parrying or active reloading to perfect.
That’s probably for the best and on purpose. Though you can construct a playstyle around boosted pugilistics, fighting is present to fill the holes left by your traps dynamically. Veterans of the series will recognise the frantic delight of personally sniping a kobold runner who has slipped between the blades of your pneumatic machinery.
Consider yourself an interior designer in a world where one of the pillars of feng shui is murder.
If the fighting became more involved, it would draw too much attention, throwing the balance of this classic genre combination off. Robot Entertainment has been developing Orcs Must Die! for a long time—it will be ten years old in October—and understands the importance of sticking to the basics. Not least because the last time the studio tried it with Orcs Must Die! Unchained in 2017, the concoction exploded in its face.
Yes, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a cautious sequel, and its large-scale War Scenarios, when expanded, feel familiar. However, when Robot pursues a tower defence approach for development, it becomes increasingly experimental. The game was soft-launched on Stadia last year, and after surviving that first wave, the studio has expanded with a second storey campaign and a new ending mode, Scramble.
The latter is an ironman variation on the formula that reminds me of Call of Duty’s Outbreak. The idea is to beat five stages of increasing complexity with a single pool of rift points—the pool that determines how many monsters you can let through the portal before it fails. Between each step, you’re hit with a new debuff—perhaps swarms of orc archers who attack you rather than the rift—but you can choose a buff to offset it, such as more oomph for your acid bombs. The consequence of this growing metagame is to encourage you to try new approaches, making Scramble a rewarding way to replay some of the best levels.
Unfortunately, both the second campaign and Scramble remain locked until you’ve made significant progress in the story—a slap in the face to dedicated fans who have already invested those hours in the Stadia release.
They’ll be appeased, though, by the new acid geyser trap, which melts orcs down to their squishier components, ready for the second barrage of darts or arrows. Finally, like in Orcs Must Die!, carefully ordering traps for maximum score combos will captivate elite gamers for hundreds of hours. Newcomers would be well to embrace the new saw blade launcher, whose ricochets are not only fascinating but also capable of shredding a troll in seconds when launched in an enclosed archway. With practice, you’ll be able to predict and arrange for the 45-degree wall bounces, which will cover entire passageways with bladed boomerangs. At its best, Orcs Must Die! is a comedy written on graph paper.
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