Orcs Must Die Unchained - F2P

Games
41

Here are some user reviews from Steam;

They’ve ruined it.

They completely misunderstood what made Orcs Must Die 1 and 2 fun to play. It wasn’t the 3rd person shooting, it was the traps and the way in which each level was a puzzle that you solved with traps.

And yet in this the levels aren’t puzzles, and the focus is on 3rd person shooting.

I really wish they would have just made a 4 or 5 player co-op version of the first two games.

Also the F2P aspect is really off putting. The grind is strong in this game.

Part 1:
How To Kill A Potentially Good Game (For Dummies):

  • Make a potentially good game.
  • Give the publishing rights to Gameforge.
  • Done!

I mean, let’s take a look at some of the games that Gameforge ruined:

  • Aion EU (utterly dead)
  • Tera EU (completely dead)
  • Soldier Front 2 EU (a.k.a. "S.K.I.L.L., although the only skill you need for that game is a wallet)
  • Raiderz EU (shut down)
  • Mythos (shut down)
  • Katsuro: Path of Honor (shut down)
  • Hellbreed (shut down)
    … the list goes on …

Why would ANYONE in their right mind allow Gameforge to publish their game?! Gameforge is known as the WORST European publisher. No one does business with them anymore and they’re close to filing for bankruptcy. They already closed their location in Berlin. Why would you do that, Robot Entertainment?

It could have been a great game…

Part 2:
Since some lovely folks commented that they would REALLY (real-time executive realness) want me to review the game itself, and not its publisher, here you go:

Pros:

  • Great voice acting. They way they went with it (overly sarcastic) could have ended up being cringy, like the one in Wildstar, but instead, they did a good job with it.
  • Good animations. The game feels like it’s polished and well executed.
  • Short queues and loading screens.
  • Interesting tower defence gameplay (as far as the Survival mode goes).
  • Character development and a crafting system.
  • Runs great on a high-end laptop.

Cons:

  • Poorly optimized for computers that are supposed to be able to run the game on its minimal settings.
  • Can get repetitive quite fast and quite a lot.
  • Grinding for materials can be tedious.
  • The Siege mode needs a lot of work. It is nowhere near as polished as the Survival mode.
  • The Survival mode can be too short at the early levels.
  • The developer decided to give the game to the worst publisher in Europe, and probably even the world. I mean, even EA isn’t that bad anymore. I guess Gameforge could compete against Webzen for the first place.
  • You are able to buy almost everything with real cash, and if you don’t want to, you better prepare for a long grind.
  • Did I mention how stupid the decision to give the publishing rights to Gameforge was? I think I did, but oh well…
  • The game is basically a cash shop oriented version of OMD! 2.

There you go! You’re welcome.

P.S.: Needless to say, I won’t be spending a dime on this game, as long as Failforge gets a cut. I encourage everyone to do the same. Robot Entertainment might get their heads out of their… (you got the point) and change the publisher before it’s too late for the game.

I feel like the developers made a huge mistake, completely misread their audience and did not understand what made their previous games popular in the first place.

Instead of delivering us better, bigger, smoother (God knows OMD2 was bugged and slow) experience and a fun co-op tower defence game - we get another “run-of-the-mill” moba game with “tower defence elements” but mostly horrible… horrible grind tied to crafting and finding resources.

I might have been “ok” with the game being a moba rather than tower defence but the addition of an in game store, awful crafting system with materials that can be found in chests which can be opened with store bought keys, paid consumables, paid heroes and gold - killed it for me. Even worse - it made me hate and despise this game and it’s developers.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained got nothing to do with its predecessors. It’s based on dated, dying model and made only to earn cash rather than entertain.

I wanted to have fun. I wanted to play co-op and defeat hordes of monsters using traps and skills with my friends. If i wanted to play moba - i would’ve continued playing Dota 2. Heck - why would i even want to spend a dime on this instead of Overwatch? Why would i want to pay for chests and materials, and health potions, and consumables if i can install any of the dozens of free (or “free”) moba’s, get better experience, more heroes, more content, less grind and stores which actually contain only cosmetic items, rather than the ones which manipulate you to buy them to avoid grinding and failing?

Shame on you Robot Entertainment and shame on anybody who’s going to support them.

P.S.

I’ve played the beta in a separate client so don’t pay attention to my play time on Steam.

“wakes up”
“sees 20 comments”
“facepalms”

Just to clarify - OMD2 was “very” bugged on release and remained “quite” bugged in the end and i did not praise Overwatch. It’s just that i don’t see any point of spending my money on bits and pieces when there are plenty of games which are only selling cosmetic items or got a better economy to begin with. Whenever i see something that sells consumables, crafting or upgrade materials and gold - i just shrug and move on.

Perhaps the only exception i made to this “rule” was “world of warships” which has pretty awful grind and despicable economy, prices and store but is actually fun enough to play even without spending money on it.

That said - i am not discouraging anyone from trying this game. It’s free so go and try it for yourself. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it or perhaps you’ll feel like i did - cheated out of a decent co-op game. It doesn’t matter that the game has two modes - you can’t separate the economy and grind, and store.

Like Orcs Must Die, but with crafting nonsense and £50 “microtransactions” for a beta game. Essentially, Orcs Must Die (2) ruined by greed.

My actual playtime is around 1000 hours. So don’t look at the playtime here ;)

I’m one of the old alpha player and I have to say that they turned a really nice game into a damn little piece of luck based MOBA ♥♥♥♥.
First of all gameforge and robot couldn’t care less about player feedback in the last 2 years.
Someone suggested on the forum consumables for skulls because you can’t do something with your skulls once you hit max level and have all the cards. So they come up with consumables for real money. (also for crafting) But this greed is insane. Even if it’s just usable in the PvE part.
I suggested a lot of things during the alpha and mostly BETA game and they ignored most of that stuff. 1 year later they said “WE have a awesome new patch for you. WE thought this is cool.” And I read 95% of the ideas they rejected before… Well they also turned this into crap.

This is just to give you a idea how they developed “without” the community.

Back to the game and what it is now. I think that it is “pay 2 win” because money gives you a huge advantage since you can craft a lot of traps and other cards if you buy enough chests for gold (real money)
With my Master Founder Pack I have 40k ingame Gold and I bought like 10 chests (600 each) so far. They allowed me to craft a lot of stuff and I also got a lot of good cards from it. This gives you a huge advantage in early pvp matches. Pay 2 win = confirmed.
(Also gameforge is more expansive than robot entertainment over on the NA Servers. Again a good sign for Greedforge)

Game Pros:
Survival Part is in a “okay” place.

Cons:
Gameforge, Failforge, crapforge, shitforge, dumbforge, CANCERFORGE

I actually like crafting in survival games but it does not belong to a MOBA. Because this turned it even more into gambling and farming game. And the mats you “can” find are random as well. I can’t see a real “crafting” system anyway. Clicking a button called “crafting” does not make it to a crafting system.

Queue times are ridiculous long. Sometimes we are in the queue for 15-30 minutes (with around 5000 player online)

A lot of problems with unbalanced stuff

Still no map editor to come up with new maps. It took them over 2 years to make 3 PvP maps. 1 isn’t even in the game anymore. And 6 PvE maps (4 of them are just parts of the PvP map)

Bugs like: Game ends, you can’t quite and have to ALT+F4 and you get leaving penalty <<< worth it! And this is known for far over a year now.

A few words of what they removed because of people who complained that the game is way to complex:
Physical gates to close and open whenever you want to (Quite some funny tactics)
Leadership system to for minions and warcamps. That was a awesome thing with a lot of tactics and deep gameplay in it. They also removed that because new player were to dumb to spend this leadership at the gate.
They removed different weak and strong points on minions because it was to complex and replaced it with a weird kind of “tag” system.
We used to have fire, lightning, Arcane and frost armor. Now we have just “magic armor” because it was to complex.

I think they did most of that because of the console version that’s coming up… Console noobs are not used to complex PC games ^^

I keep adding negativ things… don’t worry… there are enough ;)

42

1000 hours and he hated every minute. Now there’s someone in the wrong market. He just hasn’t figured out what type of dungeon he actually likes.

43

Some of that was in Alpha and Beta… hasn’t the mantra been, just hang in there with these EAs? Now that playing time will work against them.

Regardless, i am disappointed. I really like Orcs Must Die 2, and was hoping for more coop with a larger group for 3. This sounds like a MOBA then?.. no interest in that.

44

Was anyone actually expecting a different outcome? I loved the first and second game (to varying degrees) but i think the writing was on he wall here.

45

I’ve only played the Survival mode, sorta “classic” Orcs must die, not exactly since you have 5 people running around, so, more of a big mess, instead of carefully designed mazes, but IMO Survival feels as Orcs must die as it possibly can, taking into account the F2P changes (it’s going to take some time to level your towers up, hero’s take time too).

Still, much as it reminds me of OMD 1 and 2, the big mess aspect of it kinda goes against everything that makes people like TD games…

46

Well it’s not like there aren’t other games out there that support large groups. Dungeon Defenders does, although admittedly I have’t played the latest game.

47

I was in the closed beta, and haven’t played much at all since it opened up. I can confirm that those users with money/time do have quite an advantage over those that aren’t willing to spend a lot of cash to get stronger gear. I felt like an odd cross between a first person customization MOBA and the original OMD, with a dash of P2W thrown in for good measure.

so you get all the fun of setting up traps combined with the threats from other teammates about how your traps are shit, and the positioning is shit. It’s awesome :D

(not on my list to stick with)

Compared to a game like Overwatch, this is completely buried with micro-transactions.
(or at least was at the last time I tried it)

48

Time for a revamp!

[quote]
When we look at the big picture from players alongside the server data, a clear picture starts to emerge– Survival is by far the most popular element of OMDU. With this portrait of the current game becoming clearer, we’ve been faced with some difficult discussions.

SIEGE HAS MISSED THE MARK
Despite tremendous efforts, Siege PvP mode just hasn’t worked out. As we’ve gone through various iterations on the game mode, we’ve ultimately seen only a small portion of our players actively playing Siege. More importantly, people who play Siege matches are less likely to continue playing the game at all after their match. This has been the case since the beginning of Open Beta, when matchmaking queues were shorter and games were more frequent. As some of the most passionate fans of Siege mode, it’s been difficult for us at Robot to come to terms with this feedback and data. Ultimately, the Siege game mode has a small hardcore group of players, but it isn’t building a healthy long-term community around itself.

As the game has grown, Siege and Survival modes have competed with one another more and more for development resources. The need to balance the traps, heroes, and gear for both of these game modes and develop each in consideration with the other is holding both modes back.

OMD IS SURVIVAL
The most common piece of community feedback we get is that the game still needs to feel more like OMD and OMD2. We’ve always agreed with that feedback. Adding Survival and Endless modes to OMDU was a big step in that direction, and we can make them much, much better. The vast majority of our beta players came looking for that classic Orcs Must Die! feeling, and we can and will deliver it.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Siege mode is being removed from Orcs Must Die! Unchained as of the next update . We believe that competitive gameplay still has a future in Orcs Must Die!, but we’ve decided that Siege mode is just not the right fit for that. Competitive gameplay could return to OMDU, and if it does, it won’t be in the form of Siege.

Our focus will now turn entirely toward making Survival feel, look, sound, and play more like a clear evolution of OMD and OMD2. We’re doubling down on Survival mode to bring back the kick-ass OMD gameplay you love.[/quote]

Accounts are being reset.
Gold spent will be credited back + an extra $5.

49

Wish they would have just made OMD 3, as an improved OMD 2. Which was tons of fun with friends.

50

Yeah I never understood why they did such a change for 3. I was hoping it would just expand to more players myself not like a different genre.

51

I had the feeling that OMD2 sold less than OMD1, and I suppose they feared a ‘classic’ OMD3 would follow that trend and sell even less, so they switched gears with this game.

52

So is Survival basically the old OMD gameplay?

53

I wish they had. OMD2 was the last really good co-op game I played with my friend. I had tremendous fun with it.

54

Steamspy has OMD2 at 800k more owners (2.2m vs 1.4m). No doubt some of those are at fire sale prices, but fire-sale prices also probably make up a similar proportion of OMD1 owners.

55

Not that I played the PVP thing, but I’m a little sad I missed something described as ‘like Monday Night Combat’.

56

It seems the dev’s have listened to some of the complaints and PvP is now gone. They are focusing on the classic OMD game feel according to the new update.

https://forums.orcsmustdie.com/discussion/11657/patch-notes-release-1-6

Gonna give this another shot when I have free time later this week.

57

Still F2P though? How grindy is it?

58

I’ve stayed away from this title as the F2P and PVP really didn’t wow me at all. Reading the forums today, the negativity is really overwhelming on the grind.

spend 5 minutes in this thread & you’ll get the vibe of complaints on the grind.

Basically, RNG to get new traps - no way to purchase the trap you want.

59

Why did they go with F2P? I loved the first 2 games. Just make a third and charge me 50 bucks for it, and Ill buy it.

60

I really wish they hadn’t gone F2P and certainly not PVP. I assume they did this in attempt to make a lot more money. OMD 3, with maybe a couple of more people in the group, I would have paid for outright. What they have now still sounds like torture.