Fans of the tower defense genre will find a lot of hallmark challenges as they progress through the levels, like multiple avenues of attack and resistance enemies. The game itself takes place over 17 arenas where you have to plan, execute, and adapt a sprawling network of traps to prevent the orcs from reaching one end to the other. Although every game and piece of media should be aware of its own theme and messaging, even if they are unintentional, the theming behind Orcs Must Die 3 is one of fun, not a critical take on racial politics. Orcs Must Die 3 is a comedic tower defense game with light storytelling elements. This game might be inspired by the same orcish mythos mired in the stereotypical tropes and racism, the depiction within Orcs Must Die isn’t nearly as problematic. But while the game, style, and presentation of Orcs Must Die is fun, light-hearted and irrelevant, it came at something of an opportune time for itself, as it releases when several extremely high profile fantasy franchises are beginning to change the way they depict orcs. Also, while not necessarily an issue, one point of possible improvement to the mode might be to include a third scenario choice for each tier, as it would make for more strategic choices instead of ones focused on wanting to avoid a specific map or debuff.Orcs Must Die 3 is a game where you must defend a magical rift from relentless waves of greenskins. The biggest example during the preview was seeing that a debuff which added a boss to every single enemy wave was considered a first tier debuff while brittle barricades was considered second tier. One of the few criticisms to be had was that some of the buffs and debuffs - especially the latter - seemed wildly skewed in power level. It was clear that an effort was made to balance the game as best the studio could. There wasn’t very much that could be said to be disappointing with Scramble mode. While doing so was not part of the preview, playing a Scramble run solo was mentioned as being an option, and would doubtlessly be a considerable additional challenge. It’s very easy to see how experimenting with different combinations of both of these mechanics would offer plenty of replayability. Even if they are always outnumbered by their inverse counterparts, the buffs are never overlooked due to their effects being so consistently beneficial. It helps that the detrimental effects of the debuffs are immediately apparent thanks to the game starting players off on the back foot by providing only its negative effects for the first tier of play. When playing Scramble, these design choices definitely come through in the gameplay. But if during a run of Scramble, fire damage were to no longer be able to affect any enemies then such a player would have to adapt to survive, and in so doing they might discover things they had been inadvertently missing out on. For example, a player might enjoy using traps and weapons that do fire damage and so they end up avoiding much of the equipment at their disposal. The buffs and debuffs were the design team’s way of incentivizing or nullifying certain kinds of play and thus allowing for the players to adopt a more dynamic playstyle. The professed purpose of Scramble, according to Jones, was to get players to try things out of their comfort zone. However, there is a rub as, at its core, Scramble is essentially the roguelite mode for Orcs Must Die! 3, and, as that would imply, if the players lose for any reason, they have to start all over again from tier one. The synergies that can be created, both on the negative and positive side of this equation, are what create the replayability and challenge for this game mode. ![]() Only after beating a map do the players get the chance to choose one of three powerful buffs for themselves. These debuffs can be anywhere on the spectrum from completely unnoticeable to debilitating and so must be chosen carefully. ![]() For every tier, there is a choice between two random campaign maps with each having a randomly assigned debuff associated with them. This otherwise standard challenge is complicated by the buffs and debuffs that accumulate with each tier played through. The goal of the Scramble mode is that the players are trying to beat five tiers of maps from the main game without losing all 100 of their starting Rift Points.
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