Orcs Must Die! 2 Review
This is universally known, but it bears repeating: Steam sales are unfair. As a human being that remembers a time when the internet didn’t exist (ever so briefly) I have no way of dealing with instant gaming pleasures at a 75% discount. It’s a sucker punch that catches me by surprise every time, resulting in more than a few titles purchased each year that are horrible.
I’m always pleasantly surprised when one of the desperately discounted is actually worth the actual price. When I bought Orc Must Die! 2 in the last Autumn Sale, I expected another dud like Dungeon Defenders. But instead I was treated to one of the best tower defense games I have ever played.
The Defensive Game
The “tower defense” genre is a relatively new one, born from the primordial modding community soup. Defense games typically feature static levels where waves of bad guys run down a track to get to an end point. You usually stop them by building towers, casting spells, shooting arrows, summoning troops, what have you. They are simple, straight forward, and usually a ton of fun.
Tower defense games exist in a sort of casual-hardcore demi-plane: they pack all of difficulty and decision making of strategy games while still being budget titles that require an interface no more complicated than a touch screen. Whether you are defending a castle, shooting balloons, or stopping an alien invasion, the tower defense genre is as fun and accessible as gaming can get.
3rd Person Excitement
The Orcs Must Die! series keeps mostly to the formula: hordes of orcs, trolls, ogres, goblins, and flying baddies will pour out of magical rifts attempting to escape and cause chaos in the world at large. It’s your job to stop that from happening. However, instead of having the player be an omniscient agent divorced from the action, Orcs Must Die! 2 puts you in the role of a war mage in the very same tunnels with the orcs. You build an array of catroonish traps to slice, fry, and smush the bad guys, all from the third-person perspective. This immersion was much appreciated, the waves of enemies truly feel overwhelming and seeing the traps work up close and personal is a treat.
When you’re not building spike-floor and swinging-blade traps between waves, your avatar also has a bevy of weapons to use. You will take care of plenty of enemies first-hand with crossbows, wands, and magic spells when they slip through you traps. Some monsters will even forego escape to pursue your avatar. When your war mage dies, you respawn instantly but your budget of escaped orcs decreases. While I usually enjoy leaning back and watching my hyper-upgraded towers tear through enemies in other more traditional tower defense games, the frantic mouse-clicking and the threat of death is a much appreciated addition.
Charming, Rewarding, Hopelessly Violent
Orcs Must Die! 2 is very self aware. It’s a game about murderizing hundreds and thousands of bad guys; if it was handled with any sort of seriousness the whole thing would devolve into a very morbid affair. The dialogue is lighthearted and the banter between the two playable characters is genuinely entertaining. The environments are bright, detailed, and simple. Even the enemies are given a hopeless Wile E. Coyote flavor, loudly lamenting their fate as they are tossed into a bottomless bit by a huge spring-loaded floor trap.
The game does its best to make you feel like you are being swarmed by bad guys, but I was impressed by how clearly identifiable everything is. The sound effects are spot on, and the visuals of the various traps are as clear as they are satisfying. (You’re not likely to mistake the sputtering green acid trap leaving nothing but orc skeletons behind with the blade trap that’s leaving behind green chunks.) Even the calls of the enemies are clear, knowing exactly what an ogre sounds like is crucial to success.
Orcs Must Die! 2 also understands one of the fundamental rewards of tower defense games: upgrading. You will get a steady income of skulls to spend on upgrading your traps, weapons, and outfits, keeping you playing “just one more level” for a very, very long time. There is an enormous list of traps and weapons to purchase and then upgrade, and thankfully the game promotes tinkering with a consequence-free, repeatable way of refunding all of your skulls. I found myself refunding my skulls and purchasing traps I had never tried before just for the heck of it. You are guaranteed to find something fun and rewarding, catering to your specific play style.
A Smashing Success
Orcs Must Die! 2 is for gamers that love tower defense games and those gamers that find the traditional hands-off-turret-building tower defense game boring. It manages to keep all of the rewards of a well designed, highly polished tower defense game while keeping the excitement high. (In no other game did I feel like actual hordes of enemies were after me.) Add to that multiple modes, such as endless and cooperative, Orcs Must Die! 2 is an easy recommendation whether or not it’s on sale for an unfair discount!
