ORCS MUST DIE 3 ENDLESS STRATEGY SERIES

Between every stage, you're lumbered with a new debuff-perhaps swarms of orc archers who go after you rather than the rift-but get to pick a buff to counter it, like extra oomph for your acid bombs. The goal is to best five levels of escalating difficulty using a single set of rift points-the pool that determines how many monsters you can afford to let through the portal before failure. The latter is an ironman variant on the formula that puts me in mind of COD's Outbreak (opens in new tab). The game effectively soft-launched on Stadia last year-and having survived that first wave, the studio has built out from the foundations with a second story campaign and new endgame mode, Scramble. But it's getting more experimental over time, as Robot pursues a tower defence strategy for development. Yep, Orcs Must Die! 3 is a cautious sequel-even its large-scale War Scenarios feel familiar, if magnified. Not least because the last time the studio tried that, with 2017's Orcs Must Die! Unchained (opens in new tab), the mixture exploded in its face. Robot Entertainment has been making Orcs Must Die! for a long time-it'll be ten years old in October-and knows not to mess with the fundamentals. If the fighting were any more involved, it would pull too much focus, upsetting the balance of this classic genre hybrid. Imagine you're an interior designer, but in a universe where one of the tenets of feng shui is murder.

ORCS MUST DIE 3 ENDLESS STRATEGY SERIES

Series veterans will know there's a panicked joy to personally sniping a kobold runner that somehow slipped between the blades of your pneumatic machines. Though it's possible to build a playstyle around empowered pugilistics, combat's really there so that you can dynamically plug the gaps left by your traps.

That's for the best, and probably by design.

Orcs must die 3 endless strategy