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By Brad Cook

As Hordes of Orcs proves, there’s a lot you can do with a portal. This tower defense game takes an idea found in such titles as the Warcraft series — an open portal allows the bad guys to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world — and distills from it basic, yet challenging, gameplay: Stop the marauders as they enter the game map through one portal and attempt to invade a peaceful world on the receiving end of the other. If 20 of them succeed, it’s game over.

Hordes of Orcs

Your defenses include towers and walls you can place anywhere on the map, along with spells that slow their relentless march across the screen. Your supplies of gold and mana fund your building activities and spellcasting, respectively. Mana regenerates automatically, while you receive gold when you kill orcs. Choose from four spells: teleport, which sends all affected orcs back to their starting position; fog, which slows down all orcs for a short period; bait, which tempts all nearby orcs with goodies that keep them from going any further; and weaken, which reduces the defenses of all affected orcs.

Sell your towers if you need some quick cash, and don’t forget to upgrade them with stronger defenses as soon as possible. You can even set a specific strategy for each tower, telling it to target the fastest enemy or the first one it sees, for example. There are five types of towers: arrow, fire, ice, lightning, and radiation. Each kind of orc is resistant to a different form of tower, so mix your defenses for optimal results.

So Many Orcs, So Little Time

In addition to open warfare against one or two marauding orc armies, each with four levels of difficulty, you can bring some variety to your strategizing with other gameplay options. In Capture the Flag mode, you must protect a town’s treasure chest from being stolen by the invaders; there are three to choose from, each with a different layout.

Maze Defense challenges you to stop the orcs without using walls, and it comes with three options: a basic maze; a grid with room for just size towers; and a map with an island that’s the only spot to place towers. Finally, Pachinko, with four levels of difficulty, gives you a grid through which the orcs travel randomly.

We’ll leave you now to fend off the orc onslaught, with these words from “The Lord of the Rings” character Gimli to inspire you: “Give me a row of orc-necks and room to swing and all weariness will fall from me!”

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Orcs attacking structures.

Mazes and Monsters. Stop the orcs before they reach the portal at the end of the path.

Birds-eye view of gameplay area.

Capture the Flag. In this mode, orcs must grab that treasure and take it to the portal at the bottom of the screen.

Lightning towers in action.

The Funnel Method. Use walls to guide the orcs into range of your towers.

System Requirements:

 

Seven Decades of Orcs

J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel “The Hobbit” popularized the word “orc” as a type of creature that’s a variation on the goblins found in traditional folklore. He said that he created it from the Old English word “orcneas,” which appears in the poem “Beowulf,” combined with another Old English term that derived from the Latin word “orcus,” referring to an ogre.

A later English word also meaning ogre, “orke,” appeared in British fairy tales beginning in the early 1600s, and William Blake’s 19th century poetry featured a character named Orc, but none of those instances seemed to have much influence on Tolkien. His academic career was steeped in linguistics, with an emphasis on Old English, Norse, and related languages. He drew on that experience as he created the world of Middle-Earth.

Tolkien’s orcs were big, brutish creatures who weren’t hard to trick, a characterization that has often accompanied them when depicted in other novels, as well as various videogames. In Blizzard’s Warcraft series of games, however, they’re more complex, possessing both sheer strength and a shamanistic side that’s in tune with the natural world.

Tips and Tricks

Pigs running.
  • Before you start the game, spend your initial allotment of gold by building as many towers and walls as you can. This is a great way to plan your initial strategy and lay a foundation for later waves. You should also cast the fog spell right after you start the action, giving you even more time for planning.
  • Upgrading towers makes more sense than building new ones when you reach the later levels and must deal with tougher orcs. Guide them into range of a few powerful towers and then hit them with as many spells as you can.
  • If you want a game that evolves based on not only your strategies but also other players’ actions, go into the Other area of the Options menu. There you can choose to participate in the +7 Balance Engine, which gathers your game data, compares it with what other players have generated, and modifies all copies of the game accordingly. It adjusts game variables very slowly, however. No personal information is ever gathered.
  • Walls are an inexpensive way to guide the orcs in a certain direction. Place towers on the other sides of the walls and inflict destruction on the orcs as they pass by.
  • Freeverse included a pair of Easter eggs in Hordes of Orcs. To activate the first one, set your computer’s date (found in System Preferences) to a day between December 20th and 31st; when you launch the game, the orcs will be wearing Santa hats.
  • The second Easter egg, which becomes active 1 in every 100 launches, turns the game into Hordes of Pork and replaces one of the orc types with pigs. You can also access this change by going into the Other area of the Options menu, holding down the Shift and P keys simultaneously, and checking the box that appears. Then restart the game.
 
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