Day 390
I have spent the majority of today relaxing and playing Orcs Must Die! 2 with a friend of mine. I haven't made much progress on War of the Lions today but I don't feel any desire to rush. These are my first days off in awhile and I feel much less stressed in general lately. I still intend to make good progress on my backlog and hit my 30 game goal for the year, but taking a day or so off isn't going to hurt anything. Plus, I love Orcs Must Die and I relish the opportunity to share it with someone who hasn't played it before.
I'm sure I've discussed it before on this blog, but Orcs Must Die is a series of what are essentially tower defense games in which the player takes a much more active role. Strategy and tower/trap layout is still very important, but the player is able to assume the role of a war mage and assist in the defense as well. Traps make up a third of the resources available to the player, with weapons and spells/trinkets serving an important role as well. Orcs Must Die is at its core a game about surviving. For me, that part is simple. The real challenge comes from maximizing efficiency and getting higher scores.
There are many viable strategies for easily making one's way through an Orcs Must Die level. Finding a safe spot to amass an unreasonable number of archers will likely carry you through in many levels, but the real fun comes from finding the best choke points and layering traps together to build up multipliers that greatly increase the number of coins and points you receive. There's no tangible benefit to getting higher scores, but I find it immensely satisfying to climb higher up the leaderboards. I don't have any really high scores, but I'm in the 1000s on a few levels. This is no small feat for me because I'm not very competitive in any game I play.
The variety of traps and spells available in Orcs Must Die is what keeps me coming back. It also boasts a pretty large variety of different levels with a number of interesting layout featuring lava, acid, bottomless pits, destructible terrain, portals, and lots of hidden nooks with which to carefully place archers, grenadiers, and various other traps and armaments. Traps can be placed on floors and walls, whereas guardians can be placed anywhere the War Mage himself could stand--at the cost of being vulnerable to attack from enemy orcs.
Orcs Must Die! 2 in particular is one of the most immensely replayable games I have had the fortune of experiencing, mostly because of its support for co-op. The developer (Robot Entertainment if I remember right) is working on a title by the name of Orcs Must Die! Unchained that inherits some traits from the MOBA genre. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it, but footage I've seen on YouTube seems to indicate it has been crafted with care. I'm ambivalent about the influence League of Legends and Dota 2 have had on PC gaming, but I can at least take comfort in the fact that Unchained still very much looks like an Orcs Must Die! title and features many (if not all) of the series' trademark traps.
My primary concern lies with the fact that strictly multiplayer games have an unfortunate tendency of dying out after a few years and I'm not often in the habit of playing games during the height of their popularity. This is part of the reason I prefer games that have a dedicated single-player component. Orcs Must Die! 2, despite its strong emphasis on cooperative play, still offers a tremendous amount of content for those who prefer to play alone. I'm reasonably certain that Unchained will not and that's why I can't endorse it wholeheartedly.
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