Play Relevant Month: Fatalism of the Orcs, Again?

Sequels, man, sequels. There's still orcs. And they still must die.

OMD2 catches up with its spiritual "competitors" Sanctum and Dungeon Defenders by adding two player coop, adding the oh so sexy sorceress from the first game as a coop partner. I put those two in quotes because OMD1 was fun, those other two, not really. I think coop is largely the biggest and most evident element added to the game, the engine looks slightly better, the music and sounds remain excellent. The art style is cartoonish and the whole game maintains the same irreverence the first one had. You'd notice immediately if you say down to play OMD2 that it wasn't OMD1, but maybe it would take a bit to discern between the two if you were watching a stream or so.

The other big changes to the game are more behind the scenes sort of stuff. There are new map types and new maps, but those sort of blur past you. The game has a much deeper pool of traps to choose from, with more weapons and the addition of a "trinket" item type that has various miscellaneous effects. The biggest change to those is a grindy system where you acquire "skulls" as you did in the first game to upgrade and modify your gear. The first game has one upgrade per trap, whereas this game has a chain of basic upgrades, then a binary selection.



 There are a ton of possible choices to spend skulls on, and in turn the game constantly allows you to grind skulls off doing previous maps. I'm not entirely certain as to the exact mechanisms behind the grinding of skulls and how much it consistently plans on giving you, beyond the fact there's a base five skulls per map according to your performance and in turn some skulls dropped by the enemy. This helps make up for an issue the game still has from the first game, which I'll come back to.

The game, like I said, makes your choose A or B for some upgrades. One example is choosing between arrow traps firing darts that cause a bleed effect or chilling darts which slow the enemy. You can only choose one, and often this is a much more complex choice than it appears to be. Archers can be granted flaming arrows, which will burn off webs fired from 'web spinner' traps. But web spinners can be upgraded to make burning webs deal extra damage, There are tons of little interlocking bonuses like this that you pick up on. You could go the other way of course and avoid all burning damage to improve the durations of your webs, which is probably a big help in levels with tons of Fire Ogres. Thankfully, the game allows you to reset your skull expenditure at any time, though it does force you to reset the whole of it for reasons I'm not quite certain of. I get that maybe you'd minmax for certain maps, but the game is largely against that sort of thing anyway, which I'll come back to.

Characterization in the game remains as strong as it's going to get. The warmage was the only one available in the first game and his quips remain cheerfully dorky, like a naive friend who spouts off old memes with endearing delight in his own corniness. As a character cast to look sort of like a young Charlie Sheen and about as charmingly frenetic. The sorceress is basically the character you'd expect. She isn't slutty in her exchanges with the war mage, but she is sort of a sadist yet sexualized character. I'm not really going to get angry given how one dimensional and cartoony the whole of it is, but really it's just sort of bland! Both their character models are really nice though, well animated and so forth. They're a charm to watch in action.

So I've mostly been positive and I think OMD2 is definitely a solid sequel. My issues with the game divide into two groups: Shit they should have fixed from the first game and shit that the second game doesn't do so well.

My biggest issues from the first game were lack of load outs, lack of rewind or check points and rather irritating level design in parts. The load outs issue is gone, as any retry will load with all items previously selected right there. There is still no rewinding, which makes sense, but I'm really not sure why the game can't save checkpoints at 'Go' breaks. The game stops entirely and waits for you to make your choices, not sure why they couldn't do saves there. My issue with this is the game isn't quick when it comes to setting up your traps or even progressing to the end of waves. Redoing the first couple waves just to get to the "hard part" you died or screwed up on feels like such a chore.

Level design sees mixed amounts of improvement in the second game over the first. It's certainly not worse, and it does show improved variety, but there's still more than a few levels which simply force you to watch too many points to enjoy the game. As I've said before, stress isn't fun. Three doors is "fun", four doors like the awful finale from the first game is just too irritating. Terrain tends to be really choppy, which is actually really the problem. It isn't that you can't watch four points, but rather that four points are all loosely connected, hard to watch and harder to return to a firing position. Again, this probably wouldn't be as much of an issue if you could rewind back, but instead you make a mistake and lose a couple rift points you can never recover. Then it's just irritating. Finale is just such a violently obnoxious level, I'm sure there's people who enjoy it, but then I'm sure there's people who enjoy rote memorization too.

I still don't have any interest in nightmare difficulty, but maybe it isn't for me, so I give it a pass. Placing traps during incoming waves would be more interesting if the trap placing UI wasn't sort of a mess.

The second game really only creates two new issues: the skull selection forcing a full reset is stupid and just needless busywork. There are so many options to go through and a single misclick brings you back to having to restart the whole of it. It just makes me feel like the developers don't really want me playing the game "too much" and minmaxing perfect scores.

The other is that the Endless game mode and many of the levels just stop being fun. It's unusual in the normal modes, since most enemies don't have too much health, but several of the enemies can just take so long to put down it becomes tedium. There's a set up with the blunderbuss and the dwarven hammer where you can beat on an enemy without it being able to fight back, and many of the monsters take forever to kill even with this.

Endless mode is not well set up and feels legitimately flawed. I'm not entirely sure what they were going for - It's hard, sure, and I'm not complaining about the irritating difficulty of "and then it spawned six gnoll hunters and they killed all my archers" but rather waves of huge high health enemies taking forever to kill, spawning repeatedly to the point I just get tired of playing. One of the things I didn't like about Sanctum is the game had this moment where you stopped moving, sat perfectly still and just clicked on an exact spot where enemies would line up. You end up doing this in endless as it spawns a huge wave of slow moving ogres you simply unload your weapon into.

Endless also really doesn't allow you to do "perfect" trap set ups, as you quickly run low on resources and just end up cobbling together whatever traps you can muster in the hopes you might manage to win. The last couple times I did endless I just got bored and went to quit ... Except you have to die to earn your reward. So you throw yourself off a cliff seven times in a row before it gives your skulls. This really clicks in the feeling that the developers really didn't do much with endless mode. I still think it's a nice addition and you'll like it if you're really into the game, but I was hoping for a "perfect traps" set up more like regular TD games. Instead it's something of a slog fest.

Gripes aside, primarily with endless mode not really being what I wanted, I think OMD2 is a really solid sequel. The first one was the best action TD game I'd played, and the second is basically a fine build off of that solid foundation. Admittedly I feel like the game is a touch low on content without the first game installed (since a large chunk of what I've played has been redoing the classic levels in OMD2) and the DLC doesn't help too much in that regard, though maybe it adds a bunch of endless maps. Most often you'll just buy the complete set, but if given a choice I liked Fire and Water as well as Family Ties, but found Are We There Yeti? kinda bland and the level design actually more confusing than interesting.

The game is great if you like endless mode, which I don't have the attention span for, but a solid buy if you just want to casually fling orcs off a cliff with a friend. If for nothing else than hearing the Warmage crack a goofy joke, laugh at it awkwardly then sort of trail off with a cough.