It never goes well for the greenskins at the vanguard of an orc invasion force, but spare a thought for the guys in the second row – no less doomed, and with the added dread of seeing precisely what’s coming to them. “Is it just me,” bellows one orc to another in a goofy baritone, over the boom of drums and cannon fire, “or are these traps getting stronger?” Seconds later, he rounds the corner into a shipyard and steps onto a briar patch which, by rights, ought not to be there. Not to mention the auto-crossbows firing from the ceiling, the plants belching poison from the corner, and the saw blades ricocheting off the walls. Uruk-bye, my perceptive friend. That’s a four-times combo.
Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap reviewDeveloper: Robot EntertainmentPublisher: Robot EntertainmentPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on 28th January on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass
In the most fundamental sense, it’s business as usual. Orcs Must Die! is a series about protecting a portal, or two, at the centre of a map from encroaching waves of fantasy monsters. You do so by creating elaborate Rube Goldberg deathzones for your imminent guests – laying down barricades to block off routes before guiding the flow of orcs, ogres, trolls and frost giants towards choke points, which you then fill with careering mine carts, pits of tar and dispensers of boiling hot molten gold. If you can stick a single enemy with five, six or seven different methods of pain-giving before they’re finally torn in half, you’ll get extra cash for the combo, which is spent fending off subsequent waves with further traps.
Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap – Gameplay Overview Trailer Watch on YouTube
It’s tower defence, then, but with the breathless twist of a ground-level perspective, and a responsibility to dive into the fray even as you try and hold a high level strategy in your head. It’s both art and science – handing you a gridded map you could halfway-solve on graph paper, but for the fact that no plan survives contact with a live environment. You can’t always account for the physics flip-trap that sends a single orc wide, hurtling towards the rift from a path you thought closed off completely, forcing you to sprint after it, your blunderbuss shouting, “Stop!”.