I was given the great opportunity to play the next game in the Orcs Must Die series from Robot Entertainment and boy was I in for an interesting experience. One of the main perks of this field, at least for me, is the fact that it gives you a reason to play games that you would otherwise have absolutely zero interest in.

I’ve never played, or quite frankly, even seen any of the games in the Orcs Must Die series – so I approached this beta with both excitement and caution.

My emotions were only increased ten fold when I did some research on both the series and the game itself. A tower defense game mixed with a MOBA? How does that even work? I’ll get into that a bit later but another thing you have to know is that I’ve played tower defense games probably once or twice in my life as minigames in games like 3D Dot Game Heroes and I’ve never played a MOBA. Yeah, like I said, this was going to be an interesting experience.

When you sit back and think about it however, it really is kind of a natural combination of genres. Tower defense involves setting traps and obstacles to stop a flow of enemies from reaching your base and MOBAs involve using minions and teamwork to reach your enemies base. Does it work when put together on something other than paper however?

The short answer is yes while the long answer is, kind of. The reason for that is that the game doesn’t exactly play like a true MOBA and one of the most interesting ways it changes the MOBA dynamic is how it handles your minions. You can choose what kind of minions you want and when to let them loose. Throughout the map there will be minion dens which you can then interact with to choose the minion, but you can also upgrade them throughout the game. This allows you to get stronger minions which puts more pressure on your opponent.

You also have a selection of hero characters you can choose from and being somebody unfamiliar with the genre I tended to gravitate towards the simpler action based ones with powerful physical attacks and kind of played it like an action RPG. However, there are tons of hero styles to choose from and tons of different strategies you can form with said heroes.

There are a lot of minions that are going to be heading to your base and you won’t be able to take them all out with your hero character alone, and this is where the tower defense portion of the game comes into play. You will get to play around with lots of nasty, brutal traps designed to mame and kill in horrible ways. Set them on the walls, on the floor, in narrow passage ways, etc. all to hinder the progress of the minions to your base.

You can also strategically open up gates for faster movement for your team or leave them closed to hinder the movement of your enemy. This certainly seems like a title where stage knowledge will be a huge asset.

On your side you also have these large sentries and naturally your enemies have them too. These are a pain to deal with. They hit insanely hard and are very tough to kill. However, killing them nets you a ton of leadership points which you can use to upgrade your minions so it’s generally worth it to seek them out, it’s not like they will be hard to find either way.

The online play itself is very nice with a decent amount of options ranging from casual games, ranked games, and custom games. Early on in the beta I experienced lots of problems connecting to games, but these were resolved fairly quickly, and this is just a beta after all.

Those were just the beginning of my problems though, full disclosure here, I am terrible at this game. Yes, just because we write about games doesn’t necessarily mean we are good at all of them but what that showed me is that this is going to be a decent challenge for fans.

This looks like it’s going to be a good game that will appeal to many different fans due to it’s dynamics. Will it become the next League of Legends? Who knows, but fans of tower defense games and MOBAs will find something to like here. Check out the beta here, and you can also watch tons of video’s of the game in action on the Orcs Must Die! Unchained Youtube channel.