Orcs Must Die! 3
Stadia
The sound is a quintessential summer one: the hiss and crackle of coals as flames lick around their edges, reaching for the tender meat above. This barbecue isn’t for eating, though. It’s a trap, part of a gauntlet designed to tar, ignite and fatally extinguish the hundreds of orcs who will shortly pass this way. Last year, a US gun ownership advocate asked Twitter how he could possibly deal with the 30 to 50 feral hogs that regularly rush his yard without recourse to assault rifles. He was roundly mocked, but the Orcs Must Die! series essentially seeks to answer the same question, albeit with fantasy stand-ins for the hogs.
It’s not that the orcs must die – though they do, in their droves – but that they must be stopped from entering the rift, the single defensive point you’re tasked with guarding on each map. While any one enemy is easily dispatched by your war mage, an action hero controlled from the third-person perspective, the sheer numbers tend to overwhelm. In order to preserve the sanctity of the rift, you have to place traps to waylay, redirect and whittle down the health of the hordes crashing against your gates.
The juxtaposition of these two elements lends Orcs Must Die! 3 its magic: taken individually, the tower defence placement of traps would be purely cerebral, and the hack-and slash-disassembly of monsters wholly mindless. Together, they offer play sessions both immediate and intellectually involved, a mash-up in which you must alternately hold the map at arm’s length and dive into it, fists swinging.
Not that Orcs Must Die! 3 takes its formula as seriously as Edge does. Its setting is a gentle pastiche of The Lord Of The Rings, with a sect of mages decking orcs with bladestaffs in the name of order. While Dungeons & Dragons may be reconsidering its position on racial alignments in light of Black Lives Matter, Orcs Must Die! isn’t so evolved. In its world, orcs are simply a form of chaotic putty waiting to be shaped and directed by an evil witch or wizard.
The principal cast, however, is an improvement on the protagonists of old – the succubus-like Sorceress of Orcs Must Die! 2 takes an advisory role this time around, and the original, vanilla War Mage is MIA. In their place are two interns: model student Kelsey and the innately talented Egan. Their fundamental differences are rubbed together to produce the spark that keeps the campaign running apace, and contrasted with the relationship of two ancient masters, whose own story is told in flashback missions. It’s smart and lean storytelling, if technically crude – even if you play solo, the unpicked protagonists’ voice lines continue to play in disembodied conversation. They get away with it, of course, because they’re wizards: they probably have codec spells that directly stimulate the small bones of your ear.
The two ancient masters preside over War Scenarios, this sequel’s sole innovation. These levels supersize Orcs Must Die!’ s premise, throwing screenfuls of orcs at you at once, cramming your summoned archers into cohorts, and sitting you down on catapults loaded with explosive payloads. It all works a treat, partly because it doesn’t actually fiddle with the formula too much, merely upscaling it. Nonetheless, that scale is thrilling in the moments when you’re forced to jump out of your seat to meet a threat on ground level; War Scenarios deliver on the siege feel these games have always hinted at.
You can play through the rest of the campaign as either protagonist, and together they embody the two sides of Orcs Must Die! – Egan the instinctive and twitch-based combat, Kelsey the theorycrafting and optimisation. Incidentally, Edge is Team Kelsey, not just because she sports a bomb-launching blunderbuss salvaged from the defunct Orcs Must Die! Unchained, but for the spiritual kinship we share. When we shut down Orcs Must Die! 3, we find the most troublesome map layouts have burned themselves into our brains, where we continue to explore possible solutions late into the night – popping a barricade here, or a flip trap there, rerouting and troubleshooting like a murderous plumber. It’s testament to Orcs Must Die!’ s conceptual stickiness that it lives on in the mind. Its grid of right angles casts each map as a piece of graph paper, with just enough clear structure to support both creativity and science.
Why science? Because no matter how often you run an idea through your head, there’s only one way to test it: to open the gates and let the orcs navigate your maze. No plan survives contact with every enemy type: kobold sappers target your barricades, gnolls kill your archers, and fire fiends resist burning combos. Once an oversight reveals itself, you restart and try again. It’s a kind of explorative experimentation with few points of reference in gaming, even 19 years after the series’ first entry.
If Orcs Must Die! did have more peers – if its formula had been furthered in the intervening decades – then Orcs Must Die! 3 would be a disappointment. Much of what we’ve written in its favour could have been said in 2011. It’s a throwback, rather than an advancement. That’s understandable, since the last time Robot Entertainment attempted to push the formula forward, with the MOBAleaning service game Unchained, its community rejected the change. But it’s a shame to see a series about the power of iteration forbidden from evolving.
We’ll console ourselves with another run at the Sludge Shelves – a tricky level where one orc spawn gate stands perilously close to the rift, and rivers of toxic goo promise ragdoll death to our foes, if only we can position the flip traps just so. Somewhere in this catalogue of arrow walls, grinders, autoballistas and rip saws lies the perfect configuration, a Heath Robinson machine to save the world, if only we could find it.
Place traps to waylay, redirect and whittle down the health of the hordes crashing against your gates
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