Place traps to murder orcs as they stream through your fortress, adding to the action with your own spells and crossbow? Tim gets all OMG about OMD.



Joining the rapidly-expanding genre of "action tower defence" games first popularised by the fantastic Sanctum, Orcs Must Die! is a wacky and beautifully-polished medieval-themed take on the core concept by Robot Entertainment, the team behind Halo Wars and Age of Empires Online. As the last surviving Warmage and self-appointed most handsome and clever man in existence, you fill the halls of the levels with traps and then spawn waves of enemies, running around and adding your own firepower to the mix to bring them down before they make it to the rift and escape. All while making snarky puns.

It’s difficult to overstate just how stupidly slick everything about OMD! really is. From the sharp, clean graphical style to the clever (and strangely never tiresome) dialogue to the responsive, snappy controls, OMD! is an incredibly impressive effort. I was alternating between it and finally finishing off the last hour of Space Marine over my Christmas holidays, and for two games that both result in you killing a lot of greenskins, the AAA-budgeted Relic Entertainment outing comes off looking unfortunately clunky by comparison. Even the soundtrack is fantastic, and if they ever release it as a stand-alone purchase it will quickly find its way into my playlist.

You’ll open OMD! with only a few traps at your disposal, but each new level introduces one more element to the mix and, generally speaking, it’s the one that you’ll get the most mileage out of during that level. Each trap has its own place in the arsenal and there’s a huge variety of effective combinations, which is of most use when going back through the levels you’ve already cleared and farming them for skulls so you can upgrade your traps to finally beat those later, harder levels. Whether you pour your money into guardians and field a small army of archers and paladins, or whether you focus on barricades, chokepoints and swinging maces, or just fill the level with mana stations so you can cast constant spells and run around like an idiot, there’s no wrong way to do it.


OMD! also gives you access to three “skill trees” of sorts in the form of Weavers, which you can use each level to customise your gameplay style. I personally prefer the Steel Weaver hands-down, as her abilities increase the power of all your traps exponentially from the get go which, while not making you as much of a mage-tank as the other Weaver trees might do, frees you up to concentrate on other things. The Weavers reset each level so you need to sacrifice your gold to buy into their tree instead of spending it on traps, but it’s well worth your time to do so as the upgrades generally pay for themselves very quickly.

The enemies in OMD! come in more flavours than just orcs. You’ll also have to deal with fast, tiny Kobolds who sprint for the rift past all of your traps, Gnoll Hunters who ignore the rift completely and just try to find you and murder you, and of course Ogres who come in regular, armoured, fire and ice varieties, all of which require specific strategies to kill (or just using the Steel Weaver to upgrade your traps to push them into lava....). You’ll be warned ahead of time what enemies to face in each level so you can plan accordingly, but you’ll often have only ten to fifteen seconds downtime between most of the waves so a lot of your success comes down to sheer tenacity and good shooting as much as it does planning your trap route. Make sure to scout each level carefully before choosing your arsenal and activating the first wave, or you’ll end up with a bunch of useless items.

If there’s one black mark on OMD!’s part it’s that it doesn’t have multiplayer, which is something that just screams to be included. However Robot Entertainment have said in various interviews that if the game sells well, they’ll add a multiplayer component - so what are you waiting for! At only $15 on Steam it’s great value and will give you far more hours of entertainment than any movie ticket you could buy for the same price, and with DLC for extra levels at only a couple of dollars, you’re also saving money on popcorn.

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