Rock, Paper, Shotgun

To all things, DLC. It’s the law. The law of slightly tiring microtransactions. This law includes Robot Entertainment’s impressively ridiculous Orcs Must Die, which is due two globs of DLC in the not too distant. The first of these is Artifacts of power, which launches for $2.49 next Tuesday. I could describe them to you, but I have a headache and need a lie down/hug, so I’m going to show them to you instead. No, don’t weep for me. I’ll live. If you can really call it living.
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Silently, so silently the Orcs arrived. And silently, so silently, they uploaded a demo of their sort-of-tower-defence opus of sadism to Steam, a week ahead of the full game’s release. A week ahead! No-one does that anymore. Well, not many. Let us celebrate Robot Entertainment’s unexpected kindness! How? Well, by following their single, simple imperative. That imperative being, of course, Orcs Must Die. 995MB of greenskin-bothering awaits the curious (demo link is on the right of that page) right now.

I am one of the curious, but first I must download 21 cocking gigabytes of Rage. Megatextures is a pretty apt name, I guess.

Robot Entertainment seem to realise that if they’re going to tell us that Orcs Must Die, they damn well better give us plenty of ways to make that happen. They could have gone a different route and cast the player as the orcs pipe-smoking bowler-hatted defendant. Press the left mouse button to say, “Must they though, gentlemen of the court? Must they really?” Instead, they’ve just laden their tower defence type game with all manner of traps and have decided to show some of the various ways that orcs will die in this enjoyable interactive trailer. It’s like playing Heavy Rain but with green humanoids instead of red herrings.

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Orcs are having a hard time these days. Persecuted everywhere they go and thrown into games and films as the epitome of evil. They just can’t catch a break – they are the poor victims of a McCarthyesque witch hunt. Also, they must die. Robot Entertainment says so. Dan Gril went and had a look at Orcs Must Die earlier this year and found it to be good, if lacking a little complexity. It looks like Robo-Ents is addressing that problem and adding a lot of traps, which you can combine in any number of ways to hopefully create merry carnage. Trailers after the jump. So go on. Jump around.

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Great as it is, Sanctum isn’t going to be the only action tower defense title that we’ll be gifted with this year. Orcs Must Die is arriving this summer, and is looking like a neat counterpart- dark and dingy where Sanctum was bright and shiny, and slapstick where Sanctum was all business. Our Dan Griliopolous made it sound fun enough in his preview, too, and the new trailer features exploding barrels, which as we all know is basically a seal of quality.

I actually have a plan regarding explosives barrels. If I ever make a video game I’m putting a single red barrel in it. If the game doesn’t feature guns, I will also place the game’s one and only gun next to the barrel. The moment the player shoots that barrel, their character will explode. That’s my plan.
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You can read about Robot Entertainment’s new game, Orcs Must Die, in the feature below. Then, with these thoughts in mind, cast your laser-like gaze on the seventy three seconds of footage that we’ve got hidden somewhere in this post.
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Dan has been out in Dallas seeing what Robot Entertainment (risen from the ashes of Ensemble) are up to. They’re up to Orcs Must Die, and Dan got to play it.

It’s so easy to stereotype people. For example, everyone is always saying John’s a terrible healer. But if you need someone to provide a sop for your spiritual wounds… then he’s only a mostly awful healer. And he never claimed to be a good healer. AND no-one else here is much better; Alec thinks a field dressing goes on a salad. Likewise, it would be easy to stereotype Robot Entertainment. One might assume that they, having only recently been Ensemble Studios (the erstwhile progenitors of Age of Empires), would love doing even more minutely-researched, accurate strategy games as soon as they shook off the dead hand of Microsoft. One, if I may take the liberty, is dead wrong.
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