Orcs Must Die! 2 Review

The only good Orc is a dead Orc. Horribly disfigured, bad teeth, steroid-packing, and sexually-attracted to fire. No really… they are. Just look at them as they fry themselves on brimstone and charge enthusiastically into flame-throwers. Crushing boulders, tar pits, acid baths, various blunt instruments, spiked floors; what kind of sadist just leaves these things lying around? Oh right, me. And what a weekend it was. Even scored a date with this hot sorceress chick.

OK, so I made that last bit up, but it doesn’t matter. I was getting my groove on and things were dying; jubilant celebrations all around. Orcs Must Die! 2 is the sequel to the fun-filled, action-packed, tower defense game by Robot Entertainment. A unique combination of strategy and tactics keep the brain and hands busy in this stimulating and reflex-driven slaughter-fest. Have I mentioned the fact you get to kill copious amounts of Orcs? Just checking.

The review of the first game by our beloved Mario, gets into the nitty gritty; the skills, the killing, the environments, the challenge. But there were a few ‘complaints’, as it were. There was nothing wrong with making creatures crawl through seven kinds of spiked instruments, freezing them in place, setting them on fire, projecting them into a wall of fast spinning blades, then laughing hysterically as you push them back through it all again. Nothing wrong with that at all. But sometimes, it’s nice to share the experience with a loved one and some popcorn. Well now you can.

Orcs Must Die! 2 has everything from the original game, but with a massive overhaul. New traps, new skills, co-op, greater flexibility and customization, new game modes, more weapons, a new character to play with, and a whole lot more critters to brutally maim.

Reading through Mario’s review will give you a good understanding of what the game is all about, but for convenience, I’ll give you a quick rundown. You play as a single character from a third-person perspective, running around, preparing the map for the inevitable incoming waves of Orcs, preventing them from reaching the rifts and escaping the mine. This is done via two methods; laying down a variety of traps on the floor, walls and ceilings to automatically kill anything that happens to get in their way, and the more manual approach, beating things down with large sticks, wands, crossbows and magic which you control as you run around the map. Simple in theory, but extremely difficult in practice.

You start each zone with a limited amount of cash, and you spend this on the traps you lay down. Do you deck the halls with an abundance of cheaper traps, or splash out on the more dangerous varieties. To spice things up, you often have to defend against multiple invasions from different sources simultaneously, escaping through multiple rifts. Do you set a small set of traps in each location, or trick out one location and defend the other by yourself? Not all traps work against all targets. Elemental resistances, flying opponents that ignore all ground traps, huge Ogres and Trolls that just shrug off normal attacks. There is never a sure-fired strategy for each wave.

Speaking of waves, they all come in threes. You are not just defending a single wave, that would be too easy (unless of course you play on the easier setting). You have to defend against three sets of waves before given a reprieve. Bolster defences, enhance certain areas in preparation, sell old, lower grade traps and replace them with more effective solutions. While initial funds are limited, each kill gives you more coin, and you can lay new traps while in the thick of it. This is where the bulk of the strategy is concerned. You’ll rarely succeed at the level on your first attempt.