Review by: Connor Cleary

In Orcs Must Die! you are a War Mage defending “Rift-Fortresses” from hordes of orcs and other monsters. You hire mercenaries, use a variety of traps, weapons and spells to slaughter, burn, toss, dissolve, crush, and otherwise fatally injure orcs and their friends before they can reach the “Rift-Portals” that lead to the human world. Tower defense strategy combines with fast-paced brawling and spell-slinging so naturally that you'll wonder why the combination hasn't happened before. Think: the siege of Helm's Deep crossed with DeathSpank as re-imagined by Team Meat and you start to get the idea.

One of the game's biggest strengths is that every time you think you've got it all figured out, something new comes charging through the gate, rendering your previous strategy obsolete. It keeps you on your toes, to say the least. You are constantly forced to try new strategies, which means Orcs Must Die! stays consistently exciting and engaging.

The crossbow mechanics are particularly well-done. First, you can just put the trigger to the plastic for highly-inaccurate auto-fire. But to use the crossbow effectively you have to remain calm and focused in the face of a slavering orcish horde, timing and loosing your shots carefully at high-value targets. Whether it's the quick-moving kobolds that can sprint through your choke-points, the hulking ogres that soak up absurd amounts of damage, or the flying, fireball-chucking hell-bats, you have to play assassin and crowd-control simultaneously.

You receive upgrade points (in the form of orc-skulls) based on how well and how quickly you defend each fortress, and the persistent upgrade system lets you compliment your specific play style. When you unlock a new item (by progressing through the campaign), it becomes available to you in earlier levels as well. This allows you to go back with your new bag of tricks to decimate a level that gave you trouble earlier, and to win that perfect 5-skull score that previously eluded you. Eventually, you also gain access to “Weavers” that provide various single-level buffs which allow you to tailor your strategy even further.

The game isn't the pinnacle of perfection, but its few flaws are (usually) easy to overlook. For example while it's great that Orcs Must Die! encourages experimentation, it can also be frustrating to waste time figuring out how something works because the game didn't explain it. Loading times are also less than optimal. Since experimentation also means restarting levels a lot, and restarting a level means completely re-loading it, you'll spend a lot of time staring at loading screens. On the upside, each level's loading screen has its own entertaining illustration showing how each newly-acquired trap, spell or minion works. (Although they are remarkably less entertaining the fourth and fifth time you see them.)