Dateyourgame: Attila's community blog about Video Game – Walkthrough – Gameplay – Reviews – Tips and Tricks

Orcs Must Die! is an action, humoristic, tower base, 3rd person, fantasy game with a World of Warcraft kind of graphic. Just saying that you should ask yourself, what the hell can that be.

Well the first thing I would say, is that normally I would not have bought this game, and actually somebody gave it to me. If not this review would never have existed… And that would be a shame. Because this game is actually a lot of fun and certainly worth buying.

One of the first thing you notice as you launch this game is that it run extremely smoothly at all time. This is clearly due to the fact it’s a cartoon or artistically form of graphic as oppose to aiming for realism. The graphic really remind us of World Of Warcraft for some reason, with colorful environment and big gray castle environment. The enemies are funny looking and your character is an undisciplined wizard, last survivor that defend the real world from the orc invasion. In clear it’s a not too serious kind of mix that make this game really joyful to play.

The main concept of the game is that an evil wizard took over the minds of the orc and force them to rush toward the gate between this world and the reality. When we say rush, it’s really a mindless rush. The enemies nearly don’t care about anything else then going to that objective and literally ignore you for the most part. This mean that your job is not so much to fight them but simply to slow them down and kill them all. To do so you have a wide range of traps as well as a few spell, weapons and upgrade to your character that you unlock from level to level. The fun of the game consist mostly in figuring out the most creative way to combine the traps in order to stop of flow of orcs. While that may appear simple it actually is much more challenging then expected since the level design pose all kind of constraint. These constraint are mostly due to the fact that you need to finance those traps by killing orcs. This mean that you can only get as many traps as the number of orc you kill and since your character cannot be everywhere at the same time you need to rely on those traps. On the other hand it’s rare that a trap system will be flawless, even with tons of traps you will still have to stop some orc by yourself.

These constrain make this game smart and fast paced. This is even more true when you start playing at nightmare difficulty that is certainly one of the most fun and challenging gameplay we had in single player in a long time. You may end up being totally exhausted after playing such level due to the intensity and concentration required by this game. This game really did impress us in how well design it is and how fun it turned out to be.

To conclude we highly recommend you to get this game, it’s fairly cheap and does provide between 10 and 20 hours of enjoyment that will make you happy. The only down side of this game is that it doesn’t have any coop or multiplayer. While there are 24 well done level, once you know them all and how to finish them it can easily be call linear or repetitive since they are like puzzle that once resolved are easy to resolve again. The fun you will have in this game will certainly compensate for those few minor complain not to mention that the gave is well supported and has been patch many time already and two DLC have been released already to prevent you from getting tired of it.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad unlike many first person shooter is a game that aim at giving you a realistic world war 2 experience on the Eastern Front.

The localization of the action is a welcome aspect of this series. It put you on the eastern front, a front that has been certainly one of the decisive part of the War and is largely under explored by the main stream games, if not only to reproduce scene from movies everybody saw. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad actually put you in some important moment of the war on the eastern front and the single player experience gives you some introduction with videos that explain the context of each map that center around the battle of Stalingrad. The story of the game tend to limit itself to these videos and the singleplayer is a mirror of the multiplayer with bots. Those AI offer some good training in preparation to the real deal the multiplayer.

The action happens in a very well designed environment that seems to come out directly out of black and white film of the real event. The maps are very well done graphically and are rich in details, the texture are maybe a little dark but this give a dark war movie style to the game that seem appropriate when it comes to recreate the atmosphere of this bloody front. While the environment is largely undestructible, few spot can be blown up by engineer explosive to open some alternative path, allowing your side to advance in this very deadly environment. The lethality of the environment is due in great part to the narrow nature of the maps that rarely give you more then 3 or 4 possible ways to advance or defend. Because this game really is mostly about advancing or defending.

To advance your team need to outnumber the enemies in a zone to capture it. These zones are represented by a square on the map. To push the front you need to hold a series of zones before being able to push to the next series of zones. This principle is actually very effective at keeping the action going, forcing both side to move to these different zone to achieve victory. As a rule the hard part isn’t so much to capture the zone, but mostly to actually reach those zone. The game make you spawn pretty far away as a rule allowing the defender to entrench themselves in very easily defensible position forcing the attacking side to play tactically or simply outnumbering the defenders that will run out of ammo at some point.

It’s clear that the maps of Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad as well has the game mechanic are well design with teamplay in mind. There is plenty of cover and ways to flank the enemies, on the other hand the realistic nature of the game prevent any form of cohesion between the players, this is due to the fact that everybody die in one hit (nearly). The game allow you to spawn either at one of 2 spawn position or on the squad leader. As a rule the squad leader dies, so that usually mean you spawn at one of 2 spawn position. There are no guaranty that the rest of your squad will spawn at the same position. If they didn’t die at the same time as you, there is no point waiting for them. It’s also unlikely that they will wait for you. So the squad system of the game appear to be very much an illusion and the action generally consist at being a bunch on individually running and gunning spread out a little like Call of Duty Series and it’s a little disappointing to say the least.

In fact one of the amazing feature of the game, the cover system, should be a great teamplay enforcer. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad offer one of the best system of cover we ever saw in a first person shooter. The most impressive aspect of this system is that it’s intuitive, effective, easy to use, fun to use and all that while keeping you inside your first person view. So you can suppress the enemies with blind fire, you can use nearly every thing as a position to increase you gun stability. You can take take a small peek and really this system is great! The only issu with this system is that if you use it, your nearly as good as dead both in single player and multiplayer.

From our experience at it, the reason why this amazing cover system turn out to be nearly useless is that Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad aiming system is actually way to easy. One of the main charm of Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 and it’s popular mod Darkest Hour: Europe ’44-’45 was that aiming was really a pain. To actually manage to be good at it, you really have to play a lot and train yourself at it. While in Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad it’s really really easy to hit somebody even beyond 200m with a rifle even without any scope. With submachine gun you can also aim very well bellow 100m and with machinegun you can single shot the enemies from a far easily. The ease of use combined with the realistic nature of the damage those weapon gives, mean that you will die a lot playing this game. Also the fact that it’s so easy to kill your enemies as it is easy to die make the multiplayer of Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad a bit frustrating. We explain this by the fact that killing your enemies is easy and doesn’t give you much of a reward, while dying so easily is frustrating. The multiplayer experience as a result gives more frustration then pleasure in the end and it’s a fairly surprising result since the game main focus is the multiplayer. Such a “frustrating” result probably could have been avoided by randomizing the bullets spread and could have been justified by wind or poor quality of weapon due to the cold or something. One thing is sure the game feel little a like the original and the firefights are usually short and rarely feel satisfying especially in the context where the team play is nearly none existent and useless.

To conclude this game is well done, visually the game look good but the requirement to run it smoothly seems a bit high. The cover system did impress us a lot and it’s just a shame that it doesn’t turn out to be an effective way to fight in the multiplayer. The multiplayer is well design but the nature of the aiming system turn what could be a fun experience into something fairly frustrating. One thing is sure Tripwire seem to be determined to support the game well and address the community complain and they have already released many updates that have fix many issue. They will also release a DLC that focus on the pacific theater. So we are looking forward to where Tripwire Interactive with lead the game base on all the community feedback they received since the release.

This is the Playlist of my Battlefield 3 Walkthrough that show you the entire gameplay element of the game without spoiling the side story and stuff.

This is a unofficial Men of war Assault squad trailer made by me.
I wanted to show of each faction in the game. Both as a tribute but also to show it for any person who is curious about the game and all the units.

I have to point out that not all the soviet units are in the video. Men of war has such a large amout of units that i could not get Soviet units in 1 vid.
Music: Hell march 3 by Frank Klepacki

This is a unofficial Men of war Assault squad trailer made by me.
I wanted to show of each faction in the game. Both as a tribute but also to show it for any person who is curious about the game and all the units.

Unfortunatly I could not add all the German units, but there is alot of them in there.

Music: just like you imagined by Nine Inch Nails.