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Orcs Must Die Unchained

Orcs Must Die! Unchained is a fantasy-themed 3D action tower defense game, third-person MOBA, and trading card game all rolled into one. The game is the third installment in the Orcs Must Die! series and features both 5-player cooperative and 5v5 modes.

Publisher: Robot Entertainment
Playerbase: Shut Down
Type: F2P MOBA / Third Person Brawler
Release Date: March 29, 2016
Pros: +Great cartoon-style graphics and artwork. +Comical cartoony theme. +Fast-paced, action-packed gameplay. +Unique gameplay features. +Entertaining and helpful tutorial.
Cons: -Too much going on. -Rotating heroes. +A bit grindy.

Overview

Orcs Must Die Unchained Overview

Orcs Must Die! Unchained is the third installment of the widely-popular action tower defense game Orcs Must Die! For the first time in the hilarious orc-slaying series players can now form a team of five players to take on wave after wave of orcs and their minions. Choose from dozens of heroes, each with their own personalities, play style, and their own unique way of taking care of those filthy orcs, from the suave war mage, Maximillian, to the throat-ripping Gnoll, Blackpaw. Employ an assortment of traps and rack up combos by coming up with ingenious, hilarious, and ever more violent and nasty ways of keeping the pain coming. Tired of beating up Orcs, why not test your skills against other players in the new Siege Mode? Battle it out with other heroes in a 5vs5 battleground that offers a new twist to the popular MOBA gameplay.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained Key Features:

  • Action-Packed Multiplayer Game – the award-winning, orc-smashing gameplay that the franchise is known for, now offered in a multiplayer game.
  • Survival and Endless Mode – form a team of 5 players and experience the classic tower defense gameplay that made Orcs Must Die! famous as you fight wave after wave of blood-thirsty orcs.
  • A New Breed of MOBA - fight it out with another team in the new Siege Mode that brings a unique twist to MOBA gameplay.
  • More Heroes, More Fun – War Mage and Sorceress returns with a bunch of other companions. Choose from dozens of heroes each with their own personalities, play styles, and unique ways of inflicting pain on orcs as well as other heroes.
  • It’s A Trap! – employ a variety of traps to stop the Orcs in their tracks. Unlock more traps or collect materials to craft your own enabling you to come up with even more sinister ways of killing off those nasty orcs.

Orcs Must Die Unchained Screenshots

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Orcs Must Die Unchained Featured Video

Orcs Must Die! Unchained - Playstation 4 Announcement Trailer

Full Review

Orcs Must Die Unchained Review

By, Marc Marasigan

Orcs Must Die! Unchained, or OMDU, is a free-to-play fantasy-themed action tower defense and MOBA game along the lines of Team Fortress 2 and Loadout. The game is the third installment of the highly-acclaimed Orcs Must Die! series of tower defense games and will have players, yet again, creating ingenious mazes of torture to halt the advance of wave after wave of orcs and their minions. But this time around, they get to do it with friends.

OMDU features great-looking comical cartoony graphics and artwork with lots of cartoon violence and gore. The graphics might not be at par with upcoming MOBA’s like Paragon but they’ll probably still look great 10 years down the road. The soundtrack and sound effects are absolutely amazing and can get your adrenaline pumping while still retaining its comedic flare. The voice-overs, however, are the icing on the cake: hilarious, loaded with puns and dripping with sarcasm. Just the way I like it. What struck me as odd though is that the lobby, or dashboard as the devs like to call it, and the actual game run on separate clients. According to Robot Entertainment, the dashboard and the game are coded differently and are meant to be separate to allow players to do other things while waiting for a match to start and encourages a more social experience which is what they’re aiming for. Kinda like Steam but inside Steam, I guess.

Orc-Killing Bootcamp

Before players can start killing orcs with their buddies they have to go through a quick and fun tutorial on the basics of Survival matches, which includes setting up traps, guardians, and basically making life as painful as possible for the orcs. There’s also a tutorial on more basic gameplay mechanics like movement, camera control, as well as aiming and firing but shouldn’t be necessary if you’ve played any type of shooter in the past. The Survival tutorial needs to be completed in order to access the main lobby menu. Don’t worry you get a few hundred Skulls, the in-game currency, as a reward as well as being good for a few laughs. There’s also another tutorial when playing Siege mode, OMDU’s take on MOBA’s, for the first time. I highly recommend going through this tutorial even for MOBA veterans because the game plays a little differently from the usual MOBA.

Bring On The Pain

The Orcs Must Die! series of games is known for its third-person action tower defense gameplay. The previous game had a 2-player cooperative mode but OMDU is the first game in the series to feature a true multiplayer mode, along with a dozen heroes to help out the iconic War Mage, who now goes by the name of Maximillian, and the Sorceress inflict immeasurable pain on the horde of orcs coming their way. Like its predecessors, OMDU features the same tower defense game in the form of Survival and Endless modes.

In Survival and Endless modes a team of up to five players place a variety of traps in marked off areas to defend their base, known as the Rift, from waves of orcs and their allies, racking up combos when they manage to deal damage to a minion with more than one type of trap. Racking up combos fills an Unchained meter which when filled can be activated to make the hero invincible for a limited amount of time. Combos also become more important in higher level maps where tougher enemies require players to come up with creative ways to keep them in the killzone. In Survival mode players need to defend from a certain number of waves while in Endless mode, the horde of orcs and their allies just keep coming wave after wave until the defenders finally succumb and the Rift falls.

A Different Take

In addition to classic tower defense the developers have finally seemed to jump into the MOBA bandwagon with the new Siege mode. Siege mode is OMDU’s take on MOBA’s and features the same basic gameplay mechanics such as automatically spawning minions and towers, or in this case Guardians, that need to be taken down to advance further into the lane and eventually destroy the opposing team’s Rift. The main difference is that, instead of creeps or minions spawning in all the lanes like your run-of-the-mill MOBA, the lanes are divided into a team’s attacking lane and a team’s defending lane. Minions only spawn in attacking lanes which is the opposing team’s defending lane. Heroes who choose the attacking role at the start of the match must escort their minions as they push up or down the lane while defenders try to stop them by laying down traps in the designated killzones.

And when I say escort I mean hand-hold your morning-star toting grizzly bears, or whatever it is you, or your teammate, decide to spawn (yes, you get to pick what type of minions are spawned), all the way to the enemies base or until the point that they get wiped out. Rinse and repeat. Escorting minions not only reduces the damage they take from traps but also earns experience that can be used to upgrade the minion portal which, in turn, allows the team to spawn more powerful minions. Heroes, aren’t affected by traps, by the way. Defenders, on the other hand, earn money for every minion killed by their traps which they can then use to place even more traps. As you can probably guess, these changes make hero-killing much less important compared to other MOBA’s. That doesn’t make killing enemy heroes any less satisfying though.

Playing Your Cards

Every completed match, whether Survival, Endless, or Siege, rewards players with Skulls, which they can use to craft traps, heroes, new minions for Siege mode, and basically everything else that needs to be bought in-game which are in the form of cards. So, not only is OMDU a tower defense and MOBA game, it’s also a trading card game to boot. Skulls are used in conjunction with materials that are also acquired from playing matches and picked-up during a match. Players also gain experience points for whichever hero they used which goes to leveling up your account. The account level is the sum of all your heroes’ levels and grants you with HP and damage bonuses which only applies to Survival games. The same is true for any trap upgrades. The only things that players can buy that can be used in Siege modes are heroes and minions. This makes for a well-balanced game regardless of account level which is important for any MOBA.

Cash Shop

Players can purchase Gold using real-world currency to buy virtually anything in-game, along with experience boosters and a variety of other consumable items. Except for the consumable items, everything else can be purchased with Skulls and good, old-fashioned grinding. Keep in mind that any item that has any effect on your stats can only be used in Survival mode. Not only does this policy keep the PvP aspect of the game balanced it also makes life easier for a paying player’s teammates in Survival. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is nothing to complain about.

The Final Verdict - Great

Orcs Must Die! Unchained is a great game that took everything good about the franchise and brought it for the online multiplayer community to enjoy. And it’s free to boot. The lack of a storyline found in its predecessors is a bit disappointing and, granted the game seems to have a bad case of identity crisis and can’t decide whether it’s a TD, MOBA, or a TCG, but everything else is spot on. Every part about the game is well-made and well thought out and constantly updated according to feedback received from their players. Honestly, I love the tower defense part of Orcs Must Die! Unchained and find it quite addictive. The Siege mode though? Not so much. But that’s just me and I’m not a big fan of MOBA’s anyway. If you’re looking for a new take on MOBA’s then give this one a shot. If not, well the action-packed tower defense gameplay should be reason enough to pick this up.

Screenshots

Orcs Must Die Unchained Screenshots

Videos

Orcs Must Die Unchained Videos

Playlist: Orcs Must Die Unchained (Preview)

System Requirements

Orcs Must Die Unchained System Requirements

Minimum Requirements:

Operating System: Windows XP SP3
CPU: Intel Core2 Duo 2.66GHz
RAM: 4 GB RAM
Video Card: Intel HD 4000
Direct X: DirectX 9.0c
Hard Disk Space: 8 GB available space

Recommended Requirements:

Operating System: Windows 7 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i5-2320 3.0GHz (or better)
RAM: 6 GB RAM or more
Video Card: GeForce GTX 555 with 1GB VRAM (or better)
Direct X: DirectX 9.0c
Hard Disk Space: 10 GB or more available space

*Windows XP and below not supported.

Music

Orcs Must Die Unchained Music & Soundtrack

Coming Soon!

Additional Info

Orcs Must Die Unchained Additional Information

Developer: Robot Entertainment
Publisher: Robot Entertainment

Distributor: Steam

Game Engine: Unity (Dashboard) / Unreal (Game Client)

Closed Beta Date: June 27, 2014
Open Beta Date: March 30, 2016

Official Launch: April 19th, 2017

Development History / Background:

Orcs Must Die! Unchained, or OMDU is a free-to-play fantasy-themed 3D action tower defense and MOBA developed and published by Robot Entertainment, a game development and publishing company established by founders of the now defunct Ensemble Studios. The game is the third installment in the Orcs Must Die! series of tower defense games and is the first game in the series to feature multiplayer gameplay. The game underwent a lengthy closed beta period which started on June 27, 2014 and ended on November 10, 2015 at which point the developers opted for scheduled closed beta periods instead. OMDU went into Open Beta a few months later on March 30, 2016. The game is available on Steam and through the game's official website. It officially launched on April 19th, 2017.