Orcs Must Die 3 is the third instalment of the Orcs Must Die franchise, An amazing blend of
Tower Defence and third person Action. I’ve played for roughly 8 hours on the Xbox Series X and I will break down for you now my thoughts on the different aspects of the game. This will be broken down to: Main Menu, Difficulty, gameplay, Audio/Visual and overall impression of the game. This game can be played solo or with a friend online. So from this point on here is my Orcs Must Die 3 Review for the Xbox Series X.
Main Menu:
Right when you open the game you get the two choices of “play or options”, options will bring up the stuff you’d expect to see such as gameplay, sound, control remapping, ect.
Nice and to the point.
When you press play however you are brought to 5 different game modes that you are able to choose, however three of them are locked behind campaign progression, leaving you with two modes you can choose from.
The Old friends Campaign which is the story mode of Orcs Must Die 3 where you play as new characters that weren’t in the first two entries of the franchise
And Weekly challenges where you get to choose from a list of levels that you play with a preselected Warmage, Loadout and upgrades.
When in the level select screens that is when you can select to play solo or to host or join a game in co-op, overall a pretty easy to navigate menu.
Difficulty:
Orcs must die 3 gives the player several difficulty options to choose from, these are:
Apprentice - where the enemies are slower and are weaker, and you get endless prep time between waves. This is a good difficulty for those that are new to this style of game or just want to have an easier time with the campaign.
Warmage - The intended difficulty,
Rift Lord - where the enemies are stronger, there’s less time between waves of enemies, the orcs carry shields and the rift points earned are cut in half. However this difficulty level is locked until you beat “The lava pits”.
After playing through the majority of the Old Friends campaign on Warmage difficulty. I felt the game was well balanced and gave you the tools to overcome the hordes of Orcs that are faced with.
Gameplay:
You choose between two characters for the Old Friends Campaign, “Kelsey” and “Egan “. Personally for this playthrough I chose Kelsie due to her starting with a Blunderbuss which sounded better to me than a magic bow. I decided to do the tutorial despite me knowing basically what the controls would be based on the previous entries of the franchise, and as expected the controls were pretty much identical so fans of Orcs Must Die 1 or 2 will find this game easy to pick up even without the tutorial.
The levels started with a door where the Orcs enter the level, with a rift at the end of the level that you’re keeping the Orcs away from. And plenty of space to place your traps throughout the level. The traps that you start with, the ‘Spike Trap’ and ‘Arrow Wall’ are similar to how they are in Orcs Must Die 1 and 2. However I personally felt that the traps had less of an impact on the Orcs than they did in previous entries in the series. The Arrow Walls don’t respond as quickly to the Orcs passing them as I would have liked and they don’t get flung across the corridor when hit by them. The Spike traps however responded really well to the orcs and felt like they did more damage than they did in the past. So initially I was a bit disappointed in the traps as a whole.
After each level though you are given a score based on the amount of orcs you killed, how much you made them suffer through variety in traps, killstreaks, etc. And given a certain amount of skulls which are the in game currency used to buy traps, weapons and upgrades. After the first level you are given about 30 different choices for traps that you are able to purchase right off the bat, which many more locked until more levels are completed. You are also given the option to upgrade your traps, from this screen so that aspect really explained why they seemed weaker than they should be.
From the first level onwards the game progressively gets harder as it should, but it never really felt like it was too much to handle. When it did get a bit too hard all i had to do was farm a few more skulls and get some upgrades for my traps but not to the point of having to grind for them.
Audio/video:
The game itself is 4k resolution at 60 frames per second, with HDR10 support. The artstyle of this game is similar yet improved from the previous entries in the franchise, rather than the storyboard cutscenes that many have seen in the past games, Orcs Must Die 3 uses in-engine cutscenes. As someone who has played the first and second game this felt very weird but I'm sure if you’re a new player then this wouldn’t feel odd in the slightest. The voice acting of all the characters I personally thought was really good, and the soundtrack really helped me get in the Orc killing mood.
Overall Impression:
Orcs Must Die 3 is a fantastic entry into the Orcs Must Die franchise, and given that it has Co-op which is a big plus for me, I would recommend that everyone should buy this game and give it a go.
Hopefully in the future this game will make it to Xbox Game Pass so more gamers can enjoy this title.
But until then all I can do is let everyone know that this game is the best tower defence game on the market and I will be playing this for a long time.
And there you have it, my Orcs Must Die 3 review. Tell us your thoughts in the comments below. And if you have any questions about other aspects of this game that I haven’t touched on then they can be answered in the comment section as well
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