RATING:
DBT
Pros: Fast combat, very fun & lots of characters.
Cons: A few alpha bugs still need ironing out (being able to shoot Guardians when they dont have a direct line of sight).
By: Alex Hitchen
We were granted the opportunity to have a playtest of the Orcs Must Die! Unchained alpha version, which is still unreleased as of now, but will launch with a free-to-play model later. This upcoming fortress siege title from Robot Entertainment delivers competitive gameplay and an interesting mix of PvP, tower defence and MOBA aspects.
The title’s premise is to allow players the choice between 10 distinct heroes, each of which is characterised by unique skills and class abilities, to engage in team-based PvE and PvP combat. Accompanied by waves of minions, they will have to push through their opponents’ defences while the minions patrol the path which directly leads to the enemy base located at the opposite side of the map and most importantly to their portal within the same.
Similar to multiple other MOBA styled MMOs, Orcs Must Die! Unchained requires players to rush across the map and switch between several lanes in order to try and annihilate the opponent minions (automatically emerging every few minutes) to prevent them from obliterating their own team’s defences such as a variety of traps placed by players as well as a guardian NPC and several gates. And in addition to all this, they will moreover have to fight opponent players (given that they’re in a PvP mode) who exactly have an identical goal, which inevitably leads to a true carnage and a lot of sweating and cursing.
For destroying defences and killing enemy minions and players, you will earn in-game currency, which allows you to buy new types of enemy waves, to upgrade the minions’ strength and to put in place a multitude of different traps. Though we were unable to really figure out how to exchange the various minion types, the process of upgrading them was pretty simple and consisted of simply clicking a button in order to continuously add currency/ funds until the amount for the upgrade is reached. This means the team needs to throe in all their resources to jointly share them. It’s similar with minion gates, the teams start out with just a single active gate and players are required to unlock a second gate by paying in-game currency in order to allow 2 waves to attack at once.
Players have to balance this currency spending with the traps they are able to place throughout their own territory in order to fend off enemy minions and significantly hinder the opponent team. The type of traps and other items each player has recourse to are determined by their deck/ load out they are able to manage before joining a game. They are able to gain a variety of cards which allow access to different traps that they are able to choose for themselves.
Organised groups that regularly work together will have a wide range of traps at their disposal, which allows for more complex strategy, as opposed to our newbie group that only had recourse to the regular starting traps. The various traps require a specific sum of in-game currency to be placed, the more powerful the trap the more expensive it will be to be put in practice.
There was a variety of melee and ranged characters covering popular classes among those that were available to us right from the start. However, we opted for trying out the fire mage Smolder (whether this character’s immediate availability is only for the alpha and for testing purpose, we ignore). Players use their left and right mouse buttons to attack and Q and E to perform their cooldown attacks while the number keys allow for switching between placing down different traps.
When joining a team-based PvP match, it appeared to us that players are somewhat restricted in their character choice as each hero is only allowed once in a team (except the hero chosen by the AI bot team member, i.e. during our trial, both teams had a War Mage bot, but we were still allowed to have another player of our team picking the same class).
As common with this kind of team-based games, it was pretty vital to work together in order to win, which is quite impossible in case everyone sets of on their own without communicating with each other. We participated in a quite thrilling battle; however we suggest watching our gameplay video in order to see what happened in detail and to get to how we held ourselves during our first look at the game and our first trial of Orcs Must Die! Unchained.
Stay tuned in order not to miss the in-depth profile we’re about to publish!
By: Alex Hitchen
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