45 HOURS TIL SHUTDOWN
The five star standard isn’t going to
work. Here’s the thing: beating an
Orcs Must Die! map is a challenge,
but it’s also an art, and there’s a
degree to which it cannot be rushed.
Every run is broken up into
planning and horde phases, granting
you moments of pause to plant your
traps, before you dive in to plug the
holes by hacking at the orcs yourself.
You experiment, and then you test.
Perhaps a flip trap proves too
powerful, sending an enemy straight
over a lava pool and into another,
undefended lane. So you tweak the
setup and run the test again. You can
theory-craft all you like, but you can’t
know what’ll work until green feet
are pounding across the stone.
That fifth, elusive star asks you to
do all this and meet a par time, which
often requires ripping up established
trap routes to find a way of clearing
the hordes quicker. At best, we’re
managing to five star one map an
hour and, accounting for sleep, that’s
just not going to cut it. We have to
lower our standards.
43 HOURS TIL SHUTDOWN
At this new pace of imperfection, one
map blends into the next. There’s a
great library, filled with winding
staircases and stacks so tall you could
only access the uppermost books
with ladders. We fix flame launchers
to the shelves and blast the orcs as
they’re funnelled between the aisles.
A little later we’re baffled by Shark
Island, a harbour where the orcs
wear cocked hats like pirates, and the
usual corridors are eschewed for a
lattice of walkways that we utterly
fail to navigate. At one point I witness
my friend, as the wolfman hero
Blackpaw, pounce straight over a jetty
and into the sea beyond, drowning
instantly. A pool of blood spreads
from the spot he hits the water.
These levels are filled with ghosts.
Occasionally we come across
cul-de-sacs pulled from Siege, the
abandoned MOBA-like mode Robot
initially pinned its hopes on. Some
levels copy and paste segments from
others, while others are bespoke and
built for one-off spectacle. In
Orcatraz, our allied guardians are
gaolers and the orcs break down
doors under the gaze of Shawshank-
style spotlights.
These are the collective results
of a changing development
philosophy over Unchained’s five
years as a live game – the signs of a
studio caught between trying to doLEFT: Skins pushed
Unchained away
from its Tolkien-
esque aesthetic.BOTTOM: I’m a
lumberjack and
I’m au fait with
axe combat.TRAPPED OUT
What to consider when
laying a path of pain2
TIMING
The first waves will emerge at the
top of the map, but if I don’t plan
ahead, I’ll be swamped once the west
gate opens.1
ALLIES
A sword-swinging guardian can be
summoned here and surrounded with
tar pits – all the better to slow down
enemies for the chop.5
REDIRECTION
Blocking this corridor with
barricades will be expensive, but
allows me to funnel every orc on the
map through the same killbox.4
PHYSICS
Orcs can’t swim, especially not in
whatever this green goo is. Flipper
traps will help me push them into the
deep end.3
OBJECTIVE
This is the rift, and the rift is
everything. Hundreds of orcs will try
and make their way here, and only 25
needto succeed.5(^23)
4
1
The orcs never did
learn to jump, to the
relief of barricade
builders everywhere.