Orcs Must Die! 3 [Xbox]
Set around 20 years after its predecessor, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a strategy based, tower-defence styled game that has orc armies coming in droves to breach the rift - and it’s up to you, as either Kelsey or Egan to stop them. You must protect the rift, by defeating all enemies in each level before your Rift Points have been reduced to zero, with each enemy reaching the rift causing this to drop. Let through too many enemies? Then it’s game over for you. You can place traps around levels, and these help by damaging and killing enemies, as well as slowing them down so that you can pick off the stragglers with your weapon. These traps cost currency that can be earned through defeating enemies, so it’s good to place as many as possible at the start of the level in strategic locations - but you need to make sure to add extras as you gain more money, making it easier to deal with the onslaught of orcs.
As well as the main campaign mode, ‘Old Friends’, you’ve got additional campaign expansions titled ‘Drastic Steps’ and ‘Cold as Eyes’ to play through too. You can play Solo, or you can join in other peoples’ games in order to have (and provide) some assistance. There’s also a Scramble mode, which sees you in progressively harder scenarios with a single batch of Rift Points to see you through them all; and Endless, which will have you facing off against the hordes until you die. Weekly Challenges are available for you to complete, to give you a bit more replayability.
Depending on the character you choose, you’ll have different weapons and abilities, with Kelsey’s main weapon being a ‘soup’d up’ blunderbuss, and Egan’s being a magic longbow. Other characters can be unlocked as you progress, with additional skins being available to customise your heroes, that you can unlock via your Spell Book. It also includes Traps, Weapons, and Trinkets, each of which can be unlocked and/or upgraded with skulls that you’ll earn through completing levels, with more skulls being awarded the better you do.
Upgrading things gives you the option of Level Upgrades, Unique Upgrades and Special Upgrades, each with different improvements available, and these will give you much more power when it comes to wiping out your enemies. Any upgrades already chosen can be cleared to free up your skulls to use towards different upgrades, which is useful for once you’ve unlocked better traps and weapons, and wish to upgrade these - particularly if you’re no longer really using some of your previously upgraded traps, means those skulls don’t go to waste!
Level designs vary from within castle walls to courtyards and more dungeon-y looking areas, with some being vastly bigger than others. Some have quite simple layouts that will have fairly obvious pinch points to use for traps in order to take down your enemies efficiently, but some of the larger maps will have multiple routes available to you, so you’ll have to put in a bit more effort and forethought into where you place blockades, traps and why. Character designs - both the goodies and the baddies - are well designed, although aren’t overly different from previous iterations. The soundtrack is fantastic, with a really interesting selection of tunes that perfectly capture the atmosphere.
Having an area to test out traps, as well as to familiarise yourself with how everything plays, would have been an absolute god-send, as the tutorial segments are fairly basic, although I suppose that with the ability to replay all of the levels as much as you want, you can just view your first attempt of each level as a ‘test-run’ of sorts. It definitely takes a good bit of trial and error, especially for the War scenarios, which are much larger levels that prove to be significantly more challenging, but learning the best way to deal with the different types of enemies is all part of the fun.
Priced at £24.99 on the Xbox Store, with the Cold as Eyes DLC for an extra £6.69, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a fun tower-defence game that gives you plenty of challenge, with around 8-10 hours of base story and 20+ hours of extra stuff on top. Overall, we both had a great time with Orcs Must Die! 3 and would recommend it to fans of the series, as well as people who enjoy tower defence gameplay.
In the end, we decided to give Orcs Must Die! 3 the Collecting Asylum rating of 7.5/10.
Have you played Orcs Must Die! 3 yet? What did you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!
- V x
Thank you to Plan of Attack for the Orcs Must Die! 3 Xbox review code!
