Orcs Must Die!

In Orcs Must Die! ($14.99 for PC and Xbox Live) you kill orcs. Shocking, huh? Okay, you also distribute a fair amount of vengeance to other monsters like kobolds and ogres. But it's the good-ol' traditional orc?bad teeth, complexion, odor, and all?that falls victim to most of the violence in this fascinating and fast-paced entry from Robot Entertainment (makers of Age of Empires Online, among other titles). It combines the first-person shooter and tower defense genres into a cohesive and frequently exciting medieval fantasy that tests both your strategic prowess and your hand-eye coordination. With tons of ways to maim the foul-smelling minions of the dark, Orcs Must Die! keeps you interested and keeps you guessing throughout.

A Thousand Ways (for Orcs) to Die
You are one of the last of the War Mages, an apprentice conscripted (after your master's untimely death) into defending the magical rifts in various locations from the onslaughts of orcs that are trying to enter them and conquer your world. You do this in each new castle or keep by buying various tools and traps to attack the orcs as they march. Some work from below, such as pressure-sensitive spikes, tar pits that slow orcs down, or catapults that send them flying in the direction you specify. Others shoot arrows and blades from the walls, or drop swinging maces and giant pounders straight from the ceiling. If that's not enough for you, you can also hire "guardians" that will shoot the orcs from afar or cleave them at close range with broadswords, or choose special weapons enchanted with powers that give you control over fire, ice, and wind.

Every time you finish a level you're awarded skulls based on your performance that let you purchase permanent upgrades to the traps that make them even more powerful. Over the course of the game you'll also gain access to weavers, who make your blade or bow deadlier, by increasing the impact or decreasing the reset times of certain traps. Because their benefits are paid for from the same pool of funds you'll use to buy traps in the first place, you'll need to plan wisely so you can survive all the way through to the end of some surprisingly long and tense levels.

Regardless, the pattern for each level is the same. Time begins "frozen" while you decide which traps you want to buy and where you want to initially deploy them, and what weaver you want to engage (you can choose only one at a time). But once you start the orcs coming, you'll have to play through a few waves of them before you'll get another full-scale breather (though you have a few seconds between waves to make minor adjustments). You can, of course, place more traps and guardians during a wave, but that becomes increasingly difficult as things get more hectic and you're forced to plow down a green-skinned battalion yourself if they overwhelm a trap or succeed in destroying one of your barricades.

Both direct and indirect methods of dispatching with the baddies are enjoyable, though you get bigger bonuses (and unlock more impressive achievements) if you kill large numbers of them simultaneously. Some levels give you additional tools that make this easy to accomplish without spending a ton of money. You may find mammoth logs attached to walls that you can set rolling down a staircase, acid pots that you can overturn when a squadron dashes beneath an overpass, or outsized chandeliers you can shoot down on top of an unsuspecting army if you run out of money (or are too cheap) to buy a ceiling trap.

Boredom and Bugs
That kind of "environmental" game play is where Orcs Must Die! excels, but there's not enough of it. It doesn't take long for a suffocating sameness to creep into the level design, with only an acid bath here or a lava pit there distinguishing one stage from the next. A larger selection of tiles for walls and floors would go a long way toward making each new castle feel like a unique place. And though you're granted a new weapon, trap, guardian, or weaver on each level, most of the time there's little incentive to not stick with combinations you already know work?this also torpedoes variety after a while.

I ran into some bugs, too, that made levels more frustrating just when they should be easing up. Because no stage can end until all the monsters are either killed or escape into the rift, if one gets trapped in a place you can't access, you might not be able to win. A catapult trap aimed a lava pit launched a couple of ogres into a place where they couldn't be melted, but also couldn't escape or be touched by our weapons, forcing us to abandon and restart the level we were positive we had completed.

Worth the Impulse Buy
Luckily, these were only occasional occurrences, and most of the time Orcs Must Die! delivered exactly what its title promises: lots and lots of dead orcs. If the game's writing leaves something to be desired?the "plot" is hokey, and a lot of Duke Nukem?style one-liners from the brutish main character get tiresome quickly?and there's no multiplayer mode for sharing the fun with a friend, the overall effect is one of an addictive, visceral thrill ride that gives you just the action you crave with almost no excess. Combined with an excellent price, Orcs Must Die! is an impulse purchase you can feel good about. Tens of thousands of orcs, on the other hand, are likely to feel a lot less happy than you almost certainly will.

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