Saturday!

https://youtu.be/YGTNan9kyrs

A million years ago, I talked about Orcs Must Die! (both 1 and 2) and, golly, those games still hold up today. They’re a mixture of tower defense and over-the-shoulder running around and shooting the things that your various towers didn’t take care of.

Well, I recently picked up Dungeon Warfare on sale for five bucks and, holy cow, this was probably the best five bucks I’ve spent on games in the last year or so. It’s pretty much Orcs Must Die! (the first one), only top down without the guy running around everywhere. You see the map, you place your traps, you then press “go” and hope that the traps you set will do the job. Beat the first level, get a new trap. Beat the second, get a new trap. Get experience points, and apply them to your traps to make them faster, sharper, deadlier or give yourself more wiggle room when it comes to how many hit points your dungeon hearts have.

The traps themselves are oldies/goodies: the spike trap on the floor, the dart trap on the wall, the push trap (use it on the wall opposite a bottomless pit!), the bear trap, the demon portal, the harpoon trap, so on and so forth. They each cost a particular amount so you can’t load up the dungeon with absolutely *EVERYTHING* but each invader you dispatch will put a little more gold in your pocket so, by the end of the level, your dungeon will look pretty nasty.

If there are any complaints, they’re in the “that’s a feature” category. The graphics for the game are pixel graphics which means that the game doesn’t look as sexy as it could but it also means that your computer will be able to play it even if you’ve got an old and busted video card. The maps get difficult (well, *I* think they’re difficult) very quickly. But those aren’t *REAL* complaints. Just caveats.

A wonderful trifle of a game. If you absolutely love Tower Defense games, you should pick this one up right now and if you’re “they’re okay, when they’re good”, this one is catapults itself over that bar.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]