Hey duders,

Orcs Must Die! Unchained went into Open Beta on Steam a couple of weeks ago and I've been playing it off and on since the closed alpha so I thought it would be a good idea to see if anyone here on Giant Bomb Dot Com would be interested in checking it out. But first I thought I'd give a little primer on what this game is since a lot of folks seem to think it's something it's not.

"What is this game?"This is game is a multiplayer free-to-play 3rd person tower defense game with co-op and competitive modes. It plays like the previous games where you place traps, create paths, and use a variety of active attacks to stop waves of orcs, trolls, ogres, and other lovely critters from entering your rift.

"Is this a MOBA?"Sort of! The competitive mode (Siege) is a 5v5 tower defense inspired game with lines and creeps (minions) with characters that level up over the course of a match and have 4 to 6 unique abilities, but that's pretty much where the similarities end. To say "it's just another attempt at a 3rd person DOTA" is reductive and inaccurate. If you're looking for that sort of game than this isn't it. There's enough differences that this make this game pretty unique among multiplayer games.

Each team has defensive and offensive lanes, one teams defensive lanes are the others offensive. When players are choosing their characters they also choose a role (Defender, Attacker, Pillager). These roles give different benefits and gain experience in different ways. Defenders get it from killing enemy minions. Attacks get it from escorting their minions. Pillagers get it from destroying enemy crates and collecting the upgrade points inside. It doesn't cement what you can do in the game though. A defender can totally jump in and help out push or vice versa. They just won't get the same benefits.

You also have a load out that's independent of your character abilities. This is includes your gear, traps, traits (passive bonuses), and stuff like minions or guardians depending on the mode. In Siege mode you choose what minions you want to send at the other team. Generally this is the responsibility of the attackers but any one can. Traps and gear work just like they did in the previous games and having a good defense means knowing how to set up a good kill box.

They've changed around the way minion camps upgrade and unlock during the match since I had last played (about a year ago). Now there are crates, vases, and other props placed around the maps. Destroying the enemies will drop tokens that will put points to opening up or upgrading your minion camps. It's interesting way to do it and gives the offense more to do than just try to kill the defenders or guardians/gates (essentially like the Towers in other MOBA-like games.)

"What if I just want to play single player?"

You can play the survival mode all by yourself if you'd like. It will likely get very difficult or impossible though. Many Survival maps are variants of Siege maps but there's a lot of cool and really tough Survival only maps. Regardless I've found jumping in with randos not to be too bad with this game and, of course, you can probably find some good folks to play with here. At least that's what I'm hoping. :D

"Free-to-play? Is it Play-to-win?"

Not that I've seen. I have a ton of gold from the closed alpha so I can't comment too much on the progression. I've heard some folks say it's too slow and others say it's much better than most free-to-play games. The shop, however, seems pretty fair. You can only buy heroes, skins, and chests with gold. Chests will drop random things. You can't buy specific traps or gear. They've added a crafting system that is seems a bit obtuse but boils down to "you need x amounts of a, b, and c" which you get from playing the game, chests... pretty much everything. Leveling your account seems to go pretty quick. I'm not too high yet in the open beta but I've been gaining an account level every 2 to 4 games. Price-wise the cheapest tier of gold you can get is $5 and gives enough to buy a single hero or highest level chest. (Gotta monetize those teens and all.)

So if anyone is interested, you can find me on there as "D_W_" I'll probably be on most nights around 6pm Pacific to whenever. If there are enough folks interested I wouldn't mind setting up a Discord channel either.