But wait! There’s also an interview with the creators of “roguevania” Dead Cells, and we take some questions from listeners too. But most importantly, we introduce some extra jingles from our music man, Jack. Come and listen, educate yourself.
Orcs Must Die! Unchained [official site] has launched a huge update taking the tower defense closer to its roots. The unpopular PvP mode is gone, for starters, which devs Robot Entertainment say is so they can “fully focus on bringing back the classic Orcs Must Die gameplay that players thought was missing in OMD!U”. Smashing! I enjoyed the earlier games, with their mix of building wacky traps and roaming around on foot fighting monsters myself, but didn’t dig what Unchained was up to. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m glaring at the Orcs Must Die! Unchained deck-building screen trying to work out which combination of minions, equipment and traps will be the most lethal. It’s the latest outing in the Orcs Must Die! series and has dropped the campaign mode in favour of expanding the co-operative element introduced in Orcs Must Die 2. You’re now playing competitive aggressive tower defence with four teammates against an enemy team. Yes okay fine it is a free-to-play MOBA.
The objective of these games is to prevent waves of enemy minions from reaching a Rift deep within your base. To do so you lay traps, equip weapons, use your hero abilities and so forth. The game’s in closed beta at the moment but I’ve been playing matches and chatting with GameForge’s Dominik Nagel – a game designer on the project – to get a feel for how it works.
Microsoft may be claiming that it’s redoubled its efforts on PC, but it hasn’t had much to show for it yet, Games For Windows Live is dying at an agonizing pace, and now Age of Empires Online is naught but ash and memories. Servers are now offline, never to be seen again. It’s a shame because AOEO had potential despite a litany of flaws, and also look at that acronym. Say it out loud. Ayy-ohhh-eeee-ohhh. Fantastic. Teary eyed goodbye from the game’s last dev team below.
I feel like life has dealt orcs a pretty unfair hand. I’m not just referring to the insidious, discriminatory presumption that they must be villains of the lowest caliber, either. It’s all “musts” with the poor green giants. Orcs must fight, orcs must die, orcs must be back from the school dance by 11 or so help me they are grounded from here to kingdom come.
And now, thanks to Orcs Must Die! Unchained, orcs must also go free-to-play. Robot Entertainment’s latest entry in the popular trap-laying, fortress-defending actioner adds MOBA elements to the series’ (perhaps too) tried-and-true formula and dresses it up in shiny new F2P pantaloons. It’s certainly uncharted territory for the series, but is it any good? You can find out right now, surprisingly enough.
According to the folklore of our culture – relayed by minstrels sweetly crooning out their dulcet tones in the backs of taverns and also, like, every Hollywood movie ever – heroes always arrive just in the nick of time. So it shouldn’t be a problem for an academy‘s worth of medieval-themed do-gooders, right? You’d think so, but then Hero Academy‘s planned release date of August 8th came and went with nary a peep – even from Heavy weapons guy. Thousands of lives were lost. Better (slightly) late than never, though, and Robot’s provided a TF2-tinged launch trailer to make it official. Because things aren’t real until they have trailers.
Perhaps the pack-leader of the recent ‘do x to fantasy/sci-fi staple y’ game name trend, Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die was a giddy, gory carnival of greenskin slaughter in a tower defence meets Diablo kind of way. A mere nine months later, we get the sequel. Can such cheekiness be justified? You have two ways of potentially finding out before you buy it. A) play this here free demo. B) Read the collection of typed symbols below.
This is the most splendid of news. If you don’t know Hero Academy, it’s a turn-based, two-player tactical game from the chaps behind Orcs Must Die and if you are now wondering why you haven’t heard of it, it’s because it’s an iOS game. Except on August 8th it’ll also be a PC game, as it’s coming to Steam and allowing cross-platform play. Opponents are played asynchronously, so you take your turn, inform your opponent and wait for a response. This means you can play loads of games at the same time and with its chessy appeal, you’ll probably want to. I shall welcome it to my PC with a smile and, oh look, Valve have provided an exclusive team. Trailer below.
A trench-coat-clad detective emerges from a thick late night fog. He spots his partner – a smaller, more plainly dressed man – standing near a small bridge between two rocky cliffs. And also a pile of dead orc bodies. “What was the official time of death?” the detective asks grimly, not even bothering to greet his protege. “Midnight or somewhere thereabouts. July 30,” the young man replies. Both then briefly survey the carnage. It’s not pretty. Spikes and arrows protrude from torn green flesh, while others are singed, and still others seem as though they’ve gone careening through the air until… splat.
After Orcs Must Die made an oh-so-straightforward name for itself with a multiplatform release, it was bit odd – though certainly not unappreciated – to see the second of its orc-slaying lineage go PC-only. But then I began to imagine the possibilities afforded by legally binding, exploding-collar-enforced commitment to our benevolent platform of choice. Custom levels, all sorts of off-the-wall player created traps, genre-twisting overhauls like Orcs Must Meticulously Manage A Small Business For Some Reason. So, giddy with thoughts of pie-in-the-sky promise (and my custom map that’s a lot like BioShock Infinite, except set on a giant pie), I asked Robot Entertainment if mod support was a lock for Orcs Must Die 2. Then I got really sad.
Orcs Must Die, Shoot Many Robots, Kill All Zombies… A trend emerges, and I’m not entirely sure I’m down with so many prosaic game titles. Especially when they’re all so violent. Can’t we have Hug Many Cats, Cake Must Be Eaten, Visit All Museums?
Until then, we shall make do with Orcs Must Die! 2, which will slaughter its way towards our PCs’ hard drives this Summer. It brings a co-op mode to the rather splendid greenskin-tormenting, introducing a lady partner for the returning, possibly Evil Dead-inspired War Mage hero. She’s apparently ‘more nuanced’, using stuff like mind control rather than the bloke’s straight-up genocidal tactics. Mind controlling orc hordes sounds like a good time to me. Reveal trailer for the game that is sadly not subtitled ‘Must Die Harder’ is below. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
And their gnolls and ogres and kobolds too
Orcs Must Die is the first game from Robot Entertainment, the studio raised from the ashes of Age of Empires dev Ensemble, and it was released on PC (via Steam) yesterday. It is a tale of many, many, many Orcs, and of their very, very, very regular deaths. And this? This is what I think of it. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
A nice cup of tea and a sit down won't help
It is true. They must die. They cannot do anything else, except for make me die. I am, of course, not about to let that happen. Not while I have a fine selection of spike traps, tar traps, arrow traps, crossbows, spears and wind-summoning belts at my disposal. I am so sorry, orcs, but you must indeed die. Don’t try and talk me out of it – I’m in one of those moods. A mood where I want you all to die for my entertainment. No sir, I do not want to talk to this monsters this time.
The demo of Robot Entertainment’s tower defence-as-blood-crazed-third-person-action game landed on Steam last week, and gestures amiably at around four of its 20-strong greenskin-bothering traps across three levels. It should have lasted about 20 minutes, but I managed to sink about two hours into it, wastrel that I am. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
