Hordes of Orcs 2

Tower defense games have gained a lot of popularity recently, and there have been countless indie releases trying to take advantage of it. However, it’s not as simple as you might think to come up with a good set of gameplay mechanics, because it’s not all about towers and monsters. Instead, the experience must make you want to replay the levels and try different strategies, with different layouts and combinations.

Hordes of Orcs 2 doesn’t concern itself with any of that and tries to make everything as fun as possible instead, which is an admirable idea. On the other hand, a bit of complexity and a high replayability level never hurt anybody, which means that this simplicity turns into boredom pretty quickly. Even so, you can still get a few hours of gameplay out of it, at least until you try all of the available mods.

As such, the main theme is quite clear from the title, but it’s made even clear in the intro. In essence, your job is to build towers between two portals, in order to stop the hordes of orcs coming out of one side from going into the other portal, attacking a village of people. You are allowed to let twenty orcs pass, although you shouldn’t take any chances and try to kill everything you can.

Naturally, there are multiple towers you can build, all of which have attacks that range from fire, to lightning and basic arrows. In order to make them more efficient, you must upgrade them by spending more money, although that’s easier said than done. Alternatively, you also have a second resource called energy, which can be used to cast certain spells to help you out. As an example, you can summon an offering to lure all the orcs to the desired point on the map and make them forget about the portal for a while.

Walls are also available and you can use them to build mazes for the units to follow, in order to slow them down considerably. However, the entire thing is a bit unbalanced, because it is rather difficult to make money and you are sometimes forced to perform expensive upgrades, due to the fact that some units are immune to low-level towers entirely, regardless of their attack type.

All things considered, Hordes of Orcs 2 gets old rather quickly, which means that you don’t get a lot of game time out of your purchase. However, it is pretty fun in the beginning, while the combination of towers and spells is interesting enough to keep you playing for a few hours.