Breaking Down Genre Barriers: Orcs Must Die!

• Games Played: #9
• Title: Orcs Must Die! – Steam Page
• Time Played – 47 Minutes
• Total Time Played: 47 Minutes

So we move from musical discovery in Chime to the relentless Orcs Must Die!

Orcs are an intrinsic component of high fantasy – a game without them is stunted and peculiar. It’s not necessarily wrong to not include them, but having been burned into the conscious of the gaming public, developers often fall back on their warm embrace.

As crucial to fantasy as overly busty women in corsets, the green hordes often form the foundation of a RPG. They’ve been pestering heroes since the genre began and this is unlikely to change any time soon.

The team behind Orcs Must Die! obviously recognised this, choosing to base an entire game around the concept of orc slaying. What’s particularly interesting about Orcs isn’t the satirical tone, but rather its reimagining of the tower defence genre. Played out from ground level, controlling a cocky apprentice tasked with the defence of a fantasy realm is fairly unique.

Zooming in on the action provides a needed breath of fresh air - yes various FPSs have utilised the concept already and Gears of War certainly definitely got there first, but past examples are different monsters to Orcs.

Orcs is instead built entirely around the concept and includes everything you’d expect - barricades, traps, chokepoints. It’s tower defence reinvigorated. Obviously the healthy dose of tongue in cheek helps, but it’d be just as competent without the humour.

This prompted me to look at a couple other iconic games to see how they’d cope from a different genre perspective. We all know how well Command & Conquer did with the conversion FPS, but how about two below hypothetical examples?

Counter Strike: X-Com

X-Com provides the obvious inspiration for this. Counter Strike is an example of perfect level design, but could you imagine zooming out to an overview perspective? Thinking tactically would be an interesting shift (obviously the best players do this already). A bit like Metal Gear Acid, Office, Dust and Italy could be expanded into huge complexes with the real maps featuring within the mini campaigns.

Valve, you can have this on me.

Call of Duty: Total War

Massive campaign map? XP used to level up troops? Company of Heroes style strategy? There’s little chance of it happening, but it would be intriguing to see how the franchise would cope. Halo Wars tried to reverse the FPS, but a Total War scale was lacking. A modern map-based strategy game with real time battles would be exciting and something that’s missing the current market.