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CowboyNeal Reviews Orcs Must Die! 2
If you haven't played the original Orcs Must Die!, suffice to say it was generally well received for its blend of tower defense, third-person shooting, and flippant humor. Just like the dungeon crawler Torchlight, the biggest complaint most people had about Orcs Must Die! was its lack of multiplayer options, and the sequel aims to remedy that as well as introducing new mechanics.
In the original, the protagonist warmage is tasked with defending the fortresses of the dead world against a horde of orcs, lest they find their way through the magical rifts into the real world. This time around, things are reversed, at least to begin with, as our irreverent warmage finds himself working in the dwarven mines following the events of Orcs Must Die!. New rifts are now opening in the mines, and the warmage must keep the orcs from escaping the mine and getting to freedom in the real world. He's also got some help in this endeavor from the first game's antagonist-turned-partner, the sorceress. Together they team up, and trade witty and not-so-witty banter as they defend the real world from the orcish hordes. The setup is basically the same as before, however several new features expand on earlier gameplay, both to make harder levels more accessible, and to provide new ways to play the game.
The most noticeable addition is the sorceress herself. Although billed as a new character class, her differences from the warmage end up being rather minor all told. She has less health, more mana, and different starting gear, which lends her to a slightly more strategic playstyle. Her wand's secondary attack is able to charm an enemy and make it fight other enemies. When used on some of the tougher enemies such as an ogre or an earth elemental, it's pretty effective crowd control.
In Orcs Must Die!, players were awarded skulls based upon their performance for each level. These skulls could be used to purchase new weapons and traps for your spellbook. If you wanted more skulls, it was an incentive to go back and replay older levels until you got a perfect 5-skull rating. This time around, that's still the case, but Orcs Must Die! 2 adds a new "endless" mode (it actually does end, eventually, when the orcs overwhelm you) where players can earn extra skulls regardless, but more skulls are still awarded for better performance. So if you get stuck somewhere and think a new trap or weapon would have made the difference, a few games of endless mode will let you get back into the game.
There's another new way to get help if you find yourself stuck in Orcs Must Die! 2, and that's to team up with a friend. The new multiplayer feature lets you team up with a friend, which can help covering multiple orc routes on the same map. The multiplayer has been done via Steamworks integration, however, so your fellow orcslayers have to already be on your Steam friends list. For myself, I already planned on only playing the game with Steam friends, but I can see where someone would take issue with this. It nearly rules out the idea of casual multiplayer where you just pop in and play a few games with a stranger, unless you want to friend a stranger to begin with.
Orcs Must Die! 2 continues the same system of dual currencies as well. There's coin earned during the course of each level that's used to buy traps, and the skull currency that's used to buy upgrades for your spellbook. The spellbook in Orcs Must Die! 2, however, has been greatly expanded, and now in addition to traps and weapons there's several buffing items and new costumes. Most traps also let you spend more skulls to increase their effects or to add new effects to their use. For example, you can buy a ring of chain lightning for the sorceress, and then spend more skulls to make the lightning jump to more targets, or to add a stun effect to it as well. This allows players to tailor their spellbooks to their own personal playstyle.
There's a few new mechanics present to help out our warmage and sorceress. The mine levels of Orcs Must Die! 2 add pre-placed mine cart tracks which will periodically send a cart barrelling into a mob of orcs. There's also a track switcher to choose which set of tracks the carts run on, adding another option for orcslaying. The early levels also contain several pre-placed traps, so players can see the traps in action and learn how to use them, and decide if it's worth buying the traps for the spellbook.
Despite all of the new stuff, there's plenty that's old as well. Many of the art assets are reused without modification, and the high fantasy meets hip hop soundtrack of the game is the same music as the first. Because of this, it feels more like an expansion pack instead of a true sequel. The release date of less than a year after the first game doesn't really help it feel less like of an expansion pack either. A bonus only available to owners of the original Orcs Must Die!, is the inclusion of ten levels from the original game, for use in single-player and co-op modes.
I would recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed the first but wish they could play it with a friend, or to someone who really enjoyed Dungeon Defenders or Sanctumo and wanted a break from the endless grind-fest of Dungeon Defenders. I'd also really like to see this game get the Humble Bundle treatment in the future, but with its reliance on Steamworks, that may be asking too much. At the very least, more ports aside from Windows and Xbox Live Arcade would be nice. As I mentioned before, the game feels more like an expansion pack to the original than a true sequel, however at it's low price point (15USD, 12GBP) it's priced less than DLC for a big studio game. At that price, they can call it whatever they want. It's cheap fun, and well worth a purchase.
The previous game did not allow the buyer to edit the keys. Incredibly stupid. Not everyone uses WASD.
Come on, man, surely you can use that Wikipedia search button too. Orcs Must Die! (2011) is the original, and Orcs Must Die! 2 (2012) is the sequel being reviewed here.
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Orcs Must Die 2
The game is on Steam too with a 2 pack deal. The first is sometimes sold for 75% off (2.50 or 3.25 with all the expansions). The first one is a blast and I can't wait to try this one out. Both games have demos.
On the topic of tower defense, check out Defense Grid . It's a more pure tower defense game (with a crapload of polish). Free demo on steam. Do note, it's cheaper to buy the game (with expansions) on their kickstarter (belive $15 gets you the game + expansions + any games developed from the Kickstarter even the full sequel, I did the $60 level to get 3 sets of codes for friends). They'll send you one steam game code right away (which you get to keep even if they don't make their funding goal). They're also aiming to port their engine to Linux and Mac OS.
Last there's Dungeon Defenders and Sanctum on Steam. Both co-op tower defense games. DD seemed more slow paced but had more rpg elements in it (and 4 player co-op). Sanctum I was not too impressed with. That said Orcs Must Die is very solid, humorous, and fun.
But really, if you haven't tried a tower defense game yet, start with Defense Grid (again free demo) and you'll see what a good polished game it is.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
All those words about tower defense games and you miss the most popular one out there?
Free demo is available for this one too.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
I burned out on TD games a long time ago, but Orcs Must Die 1 restored my faith in the genre. It's really well done, and bypasses a lot of the annoying things about the genre, while still being enough of a challenge to be interesting. Finale... grr.
The answer to that is yes, perfectly on wine 1.5.9 at least on Debian.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=14392
Platinum rating for me, fresh wineprefix and no tinkering.
Enjoy.
I am a longtime fan of Heretic 2. And in fact have played it recently. On modern Hardware. Orcs Must Die 1 definitely has better graphics. Not sure about 2, I haven't had time to fire it up yet. Also it was enough fun (as is Heretic 2) that I don't really give a damn about the graphics.
On an unrelated note, I'd love to see a Heretic III or a reboot. And Hexen. I always thought Heretic was more fun than doom.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Plus, y'know... Pole vaulting. :)
Man, I miss Heretic 2 sometimes... The online multiplayer community for it was small and very tight-knit.
And I mean at 2:45am. 5 skulls on all levels on Nightmare, all 'cheevos 'cheeved. It's frighteningly addicting due to the great play balance, unrelenting pace, and that "Just one more level / attempt" factor.
In fact, the only thing that could make it better would be more content... wait, what's that you say? Oh, great, there goes my sleep for the next few weeks.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I was unfortunate enough to not have a reasonable Internet connection back then. But the LAN blade matches were awesome. Pole vaulting was awesome too. I kept hoping they'd do another, and even bought singularity (which was reasonable) just to support them, even though I knew nothing about it.... :)
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
By the way, any idea how the giant chicken came about in the blade match mode? I never worked it out- it seemed random...
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. Blade dueling was pretty much all we ever did (I do recall a rough CTF sort of mod being under construction around the time I stopped playing), but I don't remember anything about a giant chicken.
Then again, I don't really remember what I had for dinner last night. *shrug*
For some reason in a blade match, every so often the morph ovum turned you into a giant chicken with 999 health instead of a small chicken with 1 health. We used to play blade match a lot. A heck of a lot....
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Just to play devil's advocate, I actually think I got bored with the first one because the traps were too effective. In particular, I hit upon a combination that could be laid out on most maps that would basically kill anything (force them to run along the path of a swinging mace over tar pits); the game devolved into..
1. Find the spot to put my killbox
2. Get enough money to set up my killbox
3. Rarely, shoot a normal guy who somehow managed to make it through the tar between mace swings
4. For large enemies, use the crossbow to keep them stun-locked until dead.
The only requirement to set this up is a low 1x3 section of ceiling going across the middle of a 3x3 section of floor, which you could find on most maps.
OMD2 has felt a lot more to me like the way you're describing the first game. In particular, there aren't a lot of chokepoints with low ceilings, and the sorceress doesn't have access to the tar pit trap.
I think it's a sign of a well-balanced game that you don't feel like you have enough resources to win, but you pull it off anyways, and this feeling comes across a lot in OMD2.