![]() ![]() Now that the game is available to a much larger audience, Orcs Must Die! 3 shines as the best entry in the series yet. Originally released back in 2020 as a Stadia exclusive, Orcs Must Die 3 has made its way to Steam, as well as Xbox and PlayStation. But I haven’t yet unlocked every trap, so it’s nice that there are still things to work toward in the post game and on the endless mode maps that might help with those barely manageable hoards.After nearly a decade, developer Robot Entertainment has brought back its fantasy tower defense series with Orcs Must Die! 3. I was able to get a “perfect” five-skull score on some maps with just a couple of attempts, while others I had to try a half-dozen times or more just to complete at all on standard difficulty, which inflated my play time to around 25 hours. Partially for that reason, the difficulty across the 18 scenarios felt wildly inconsistent. But if it’s just you, you have to abandon the artillery and fall back to the interior pretty much as soon as the doors are breached. Playing through solo, it felt like most War Scenarios are balanced toward two-player co-op, where one person could thin out the orcs’ numbers by manning a catapult and bombarding the orcs as they charge while the other mops up the survivors inside. And when the invaders inevitably break down your castle doors, all of the big traps are disabled while you’re inside and you have to play it just like any other level. There’s little opportunity to control the route of the hoard, and it’s frustrating to put down an expensive extra-large trap only to have the vast majority of the enemy troops simply walk around it. This grand idea never really worked that well, though, because outside the castle everything’s so spread out. These come with their own set of weapons of mass destruction to fight off enormous armies of orcs as they lay siege to your castle, like catapults, entire groups of archers, giant spring traps, and spiked balls that roll downhill and wipe out entire columns of enemies. “Orcs Must Die! 3’s biggest new feature is its five War Scenario maps. I do wish there were some variation to the rank-and-file orcs and ogres, though – when every heavy orc is identical, down to how they wear their armor, it makes things a little monotonous by the time you slaughter your 2,000th one. Even if it’s as simple as changing from rivers of lava to rivers of green acid slime or night to day, combined with the very different layouts of the maps it was enough to make each level feel at least somewhat distinctive. Even though the bandwidth is effectively free, that was always nagging at the back of my mind as I played.All of the locations are some variation on a castle setting, but there’s a decent amount of colorful visual variety to it to keep it from getting stale. At that resolution, Stadia says it can use up to 20GB an hour, which means I transferred half a terabyte of data to play a game that couldn’t be more than 25GB if it were installed locally. Finally, after spending roughly 25 hours playing at 4K, I was grateful that my internet plan does not have a bandwidth cap. If Stadia’s going to live up to the promise of being able to pick up a phone and play high-end games on a whim, Google is going to have to sort that part out. Also, every time I started it up I was always surprised that it took a full minute between pushing the play button and being able to actually play – given that we’re a few months away from new console hardware that promises the death of load times, that’s not a great look. For example, the resolution has dropped below 4K for a few moments for no discernable reason. However, there were definitely things that popped up that wouldn’t have been an issue if I’d been playing Orcs Must Die! 3 on my PC. Latency is present but not so bad I couldn’t bullseye small, moving targets just before they made it into my rift. ![]() Overall, I’ve come away impressed: if you hadn’t told me I wasn’t running locally, most of the time I probably wouldn’t have noticed a difference. Playing on StadiaOutside of a few brief demos, Orcs Must Die! 3 was my first real experience playing a game on Google Stadia, using my Windows PC through Google Chrome and over a hard-wired gigabit fiber internet connection. I did notice some choppiness during some crowded battles, but other than that it ran smoothly, especially after a restart. “The Orcs Must Die! art style hasn’t changed much from the distinctively cartoony look we first saw in 2011, but it has aged extremely well and the orcs and environments look great in 4K. ![]()
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