Robot Entertainment’s tower defence game Orcs Must Die! has only been available for just under a year now, but already the sequel is here. As you can imagine, not much has changed in regards to the game mechanics and presentation, but there have still been enough changes made to the game to make this worth the £11.99 price tag.
Because it’s a perfect game to dip in and out of, I played Orcs Must Die! quite a lot, and I was rather fond of the mixture of tower defence and third-person shooting; they are made for each other. With its addictive gameplay, witty humour and fun visual appearance, Orcs Must Die! is a must buy for your video gaming collection.
Having experienced the first game, I was looking forward to seeing what Robot Entertainment could do with their sequel, Orcs Must Die! 2, whilst all the while fretting about whether it was too soon for them to be doing a sequel.
Even though the sequel is more of the same, there’s just about enough content to keep you hooked, and though Robot Entertainment could have spent a little more time on a sequel, it’s a worthy release regardless.
The war mage makes a return in Orcs Must Die! 2, and he’s just as funny as he was when he made his first appearance. But he now has an ally, a Sorceress, a more intelligent and tactful being, just to balance out the collective IQ.
You can play as either character, and with the aide of magic and mind control, you must kill the orcs, and stop them from getting through the rifts that you are tasked to protect. But this wouldn’t be a tower defence game without the traps. There are more than 50 traps, weapons and guardians at your disposal, and when combined this gives you enough of an arsenal to fight-off over 20 types of orc who try their hardest to have you overrun.
Perhaps the biggest and most notable addition to the sequel is the co-op feature. You can play the entirety of the story offline, by yourself, or you can play it all with a another gamer, online. The co-op gameplay will become more needed in the later stages of the story, where there are multiple rifts to protect, and more orcs to protect them from. Tackling these later levels by yourself is quite the mission, and if you do so then there will be a lot of do-overs involved, trust me. This will become frustrating, and the game becomes a case of trial and error, but it isn’t impossible by any means.
Because the tower defence genre has been type-cast to a top-down, point-and-click game, the Orcs Must Die experience is a refreshing change, and a very unique one indeed. Instead of pointing and clicking, you are to run around the level freely, using the war mage or the sorceress, placing traps where and when possible, as well as fighting the orc yourself.
It’s fast-paced, it’s fun, it’s addictive, and it looks and sounds fantastic. Orcs Must Die! 2 is for everybody; newcomers to the series will love it, and people who already own the first game will love it, too, even though it’s only been around 10 months since its predecessors release. There is a certain danger of it becoming slightly repetitive over time, but there’s no doubt that it has the longevity to be worth more than what you pay for the game, especially now there’s co-op involved.