The Case

Tower defense games, like zombies, are experiencing their golden age. Unlike zombies, they have yet to outstay their welcome and become creatively bankrupt. In the cheerfully named Orcs Must Die! you become the War Mage, who has to stop wave after wave of orcs (and their buddies of various orcyness) from reaching rifts leading to other worlds.

The Trial

Of course, there’s a bit more plot than that. The rifts are located in a dead world and locked up in fortresses. Said fortresses are guarded by an order of war mages. The player character was accepted as an apprentice only because of his affinity for magic. In cutscenes, his dead former mentor (who’s also the narrator here) will comment on his ineptitude and how it will spell doom for the whole world. No pressure here, huh?

Each level has one or more doors that the orcs will charge in through. They will try to reach the mentioned rifts and step through them. Enough orcs do that and the rift goes boom. Your task is to prevent that. The war mage is controlled like any run-of-the-mill third person shooter character, and is initially armed with a crossbow (yes, you can do headshots on orks). However, at the beggining of each level, you are able to choose which weapons, spells or traps you want to use. Careful though – the selection is final for that level, unless you restart. You place whatever defenses you can afford and let loose the invasion.

At first, your arsenal is meager. The obligatory crossbow, bladestaff, spike and tar traps. But, after each level, new stuff is unlocked, like minions (elf archers – of course they’re elves…and paladins), traps (spring traps, arrow launchers, wall choppers – the works) and spells (wind, ice, etc.). Some stuff is better suited for some levels than the others. You will use all those things to develop killing fields so effective, it will make hardened veterans of SS-Totenkpfverbande shed a tear. Tar pits slow down enemies so other traps get time to restart, spring traps throw them into lava and acid pits, blockades force them into narrow kill tunnels, that just happen to be covered by elven archers… it’s a mess. A glorious mess of dead orcs (as a W40K fan I have yet to write “orcs” with a “c” on the first try) and kobolds and whatnot. Like a satanic Rube Goldberg I laughed as one catapult threw an ogre two stories down, where another spring trap plunged it into lava.

The levels are all varied. While some might complain about all of them being in a castle (some people will complain about everything), they are quite different and therefore require different tactics. Some don’t have decent places for minions. Others offer orcs many a path to a rift. Some have wide halls, while others have narrow corridors. The best ones also feature lava/acid pits (I can’t stress my love for them enough). Orcs might come from one, or multiple doors and multiple directions. So that requires making several entirely autonomous kill zones, that will deal with everything thrown at them.

Of course, the enemies aren’t only orcs. There are crossbow orcs, fast little kobold runners, gnoll assassins and ogres with health bars as wide as Rosie O’Donnel. They work differently (gnolls, say, ignore blockades and run straight towards the player) and must be adapted to. Flying critters are the worst and are best left to massed ranks of archers. The faster and the more orcs you kill, the bigger combo you get. And that means more money for traps and upgrades.

Oh yes, eventually you’ll get in-level upgrade trees. You can only choose one in every level, so you have to check twice. I mostly chose the one that focused on traps and minions: more money from monsters killed by traps is a no brainer, while minion regeneration and spring traps powerful enough to fling ogres (hopefully into some melty death pit) are bloody handy.

After every level, your score is tallied and you are assigned a number of skulls, maximum possible number being 5. You get penalized for such things as loss of rift health (that also happens when you die) and taking too long to finish off orcs. Why you need these skulls? To permanently upgrade your gear, of course. Every trap and minion has one level of advancement: some of them will become deadlier, others cheaper (yay!). You can’t upgrade every last trap you have, then again, you don’t need to, you’re not using every last one of them anyways.

The graphics are nice and cel shaded, and the game works with nary a glitch. The sea of invading orcs is really something to behold…while their deaths, especially when burned to ash by some flame based chicanery, are something to laugh at. The sound part is done pretty well too. However, this game has a marked hatred for subtitles. This is sad, because bigger parts of the plot are slowly revealed during dialogues…in levels. Which are full of orcs screaming and traps springing. So, you won’t hear much there. Other than that, the game kicks (green) ass.

The Verdict

Orcs Must Die! is the funniest tower defense game to date, and probably the most enjoyable one yet. It wins by having interesting humanoid enemies, instead of some vague critters or aliens, and by giving you tools to dispatch them in pleasantly gruesome ways. After finishing the game, you’ll be so adept at setting up traps, you’ll make Perturabo (or Jigsaw, for the more boring of you) himself proud.

Case Review