ORCS MUST DIE 3 LOCAL CO OP SERIES

Honestly, the ice attack is tough to go without – being able to freeze one enemy or an entire group in their tracks is invaluable when you’re facing down a charging ogre (who annoyingly stuns you before he attacks) or making a last-second effort to stop a durable enemy from making it into your castle’s mystical end zone.Įach playable character, including those you unlock after completing the campaign, is distinguished by a special movement ability, but I haven’t found them especially useful.

This game is a little bit sadistic when you think about it, so I recommend against that.Īnything that’s left standing you have to deal with yourself using the simple but effective third-person shooting and trinket spells. This game is a little bit sadistic when you think about it, so I recommend against that.The more abuse you make them take, the higher the score (and thus resources for more traps to lay for the next wave) you extract from them when they finally die, and that means there’s actually value in hitting them with low-damage traps so that they don’t die immediately. Once you’ve made them take the most inconvenient path possible with barricades (their route is helpfully visualized by ghost orcs during the planning phase), you litter the way with spike traps that impale them from below, shock traps that zap them from above, arrow traps that blast them with projectiles out of the walls, spring traps that launch them into pools of lava or literal meat grinders, saw blades that protrude from the floor, flaming coals they have to walk over, and more.

Each of the 18 levels is a challenging puzzle to optimize the enemies’ path so that they trigger as many traps as possible. It’s fine, just superficial.īut as always, it’s immensely satisfying to assemble an efficient slaughterhouse by laying down a variety of different traps and racking up combo scores by bouncing your parade of victims from one to the next. The potentially interesting story ideas they hint at, like one of them being an especially gifted magic user, don’t actually go anywhere and play no part in resolving the conflict with a villain with all the character development of Megatron from the original Transformers cartoon. The two new warmage characters’ banter has a couple of chuckle-worthy moments as the sassy one berates the oblivious one until they earn mutual respect as they discover they make a good team, but outside of that it’s pretty run-of-the-mill. Orcs Must Die! 3’s story is the same goofy fantasy from the previous two games. It’s all still good meat-grinding fun, of course, but it’s very familiar. And the one big new idea, the large-scale War Scenario maps, are too spread out to really play to the series’ strengths. I have to admit I was a little surprised at how literal that return is, though – so much of the selection of traps and menagerie of orcs is recycled from 2012’s OMD 2 that it feels like the kind of iterative sequel you’d get one year after the last game, rather than eight.

ORCS MUST DIE 3 LOCAL CO OP SERIES

After an unsuccessful detour into competitive multiplayer in Orcs Must Die! Unchained, the Stadia-exclusive Orcs Must Die! 3 is a return to the co-op action/tower defense gameplay that made this series an old favorite of mine.

Orcs must die 3 local co op