Author: Steve

Many games try to blend tower defense and shooter combat. Orcs Must Die succeeds in a way that many others do not. It manages to make tower type and placement, and your ability to land headshots and manage special abilities feel important, powerful, and necessary to your success or failure. It’s a game that understands tension curves; there will be waves that are sure things and waves that you swear you wouldn’t have survived if you’d been prioritizing targets with your special abilities.

Arguably Rockstar’s best game, with a stellar (original) soundtrack. It’s GTA if all the characters were children, and it was set in a private boarding school. The gangs are the different cliques: nerds, jocks, preps, greasers, staff. In a weird way, it has more social and political intrigue than GTA because everyone understands highschool. Despite everything being a caricature, the lowered stakes make it much easier to fall completely into this world.

 

Determining the location of a rival’s date, hiding in a nearby tree top, ruining the romantic mood with surprise water balloon attack and slinking away without them knowing it was you.

On the way home outrunning a truancy officer on your bike via dirt road and sneaking back into your dorm.

It’s the high school/college life you probably never had but secretly wish you did.

 

It’s not without it’s flaws; the controls, checkpoints, saving, and some of its minigames may make you never want to go to that class or get detention again. But that in itself is another amazing thing, creating the same emotions and thought processes in the player as the main character; “I don’t want to go to class, it takes forever and it’s boring.”