Game Details Developer: Robot Entertainment

Publisher: Robot Entertainment

Platform: PC

Release Date: July 30, 2012

Price: $15

Links: Steam | GamersGate Robot Entertainment: Robot Entertainment: PCJuly 30, 2012: $15

The worst thing about the tower defense genre just might be the waiting. You spend all that time between waves of bad guys carefully setting up a truly diabolical, maze-like series of threats and traps for them to march through, then you’re stuck simply watching that death march play out. Sure, seeing the carnage unfold can be cathartic, and you can usually fill in some holes with a few last-minute defenses. But for the most part, you’re just sitting and waiting for your resources to replenish so you can actually play the game again.

The original Orcs Must Die went a long way toward fixing this problem by adding a bit of direct, third-person combat to the traditional tower defense mix. Now, instead of just waiting for your resources to replenish so you can put up more defenses, you could take a more active role in beating down the encroaching hordes. It was an ingenious combination that beautifully merged the best of twitch gaming and strategy gaming without letting either side feel either tacked on or overbearing.

Now, less than nine months after Orcs Must Die’s initial release, Orcs Must Die 2 does its best to extend this original concept without really altering it. The most crucial addition by far is a new co-operative multiplayer mode, which quickly comes to feel like the preferred way to play the game. The levels largely feel designed to be handled by two players, who can more easily split their attentions between defending far-flung monster entry points and supporting each others’ weak points as they pop up. These levels aren't impossible for single players by a long shot, but rushing to cover attacks from multiple angles feels a little less manageable and more harried when alone.

There’s also a new playable character type, a sorceress, who apparently studied under the same tutelage as the returning War Mage from the first game (a fact that unfolds through some amusingly witty pre-match banter between the two characters). In true video-game-female-counterpart-archetype fashion, the sorceress comes equipped with a staff that performs longer range but weaker attacks. She also has the ability to briefly recruit enemies to fight alongside her, which adds a nice little wrinkle to the usual kill-everything-that-moves strategy by asking you to actually protect the bigger monsters as they temporarily fight at your side.

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Aside from those two major changes (and a welcome new Endless mode that lets you play as long as your defenses can hold out), the game largely feels like a well-designed expansion pack for the original game. It piles more weapons, traps, enemy types, and levels on to the already strong core design. A lot of the new traps and weapons initially feel like only slightly modified versions of basic ideas already present in the first game, but each seems to have some small distinction that makes it a valuable new tool. And you can earn upgrades for those tools through impressive in-game performances, letting you mold them into versions that are best-suited to your particular play style.

Half the fun of Orcs Must Die 2 is coming up with ways to combine these traps and weapons into killing machines that are more effective than the simple sum of their parts. You’ll need to use those traps inventively to handle the expanded enemy roster, which includes a wider variety of beasts with special abilities that require strategies more thoughtful than simply pouring as much damage as possible onto them. However you decide to play, you’ll quickly come across at least one type of enemy that seems perfectly designed to foil your plans.

The new levels are also a highlight, with multiple enemy paths winding up and down stairs, through narrow hallways and into notoriously hard to defend open courtyards that force you to make some tough decisions about how to pour your limited resources into defending enemies coming from multiple directions at once. It’s hard to come up with a single dominant strategy that can simply carry you through the entire game. You have to treat each level as its own puzzle, and match the specific traps you choose to the specific layout of the level and the specific types of enemies you’ll encounter there.

If you played out the original Orcs Must Die last year, the expanded content available in the sequel will remind you why you enjoyed it so much in the first place. If you missed out on the original, now is the time to find out how much more engaging a little dollop of action can make the slow-paced tower defense genre.