AVOID | LACKING | MAYBE | WORTHWHILE | COMPELLING | UNMISSABLE

Orcs Must Die! 2 is a popular tower defense game that relies on combat and strategy for the player(s) to succeed.

Tower defense games aren't normally my thing, with a misguided 51-minute foray into Sanctum 2 8 years ago being the last time I really played one. That said, I ended up really enjoying my time with this game - there's a good variety of levels which in turn require you to adapt your strategy to the strengths/weaknesses of a particular map, there's a functional co-op mode which barely exists for a lot of games today, let alone when this first came out, there are different difficulty options, and there are a wide variety of traps, weapons, trinkets, etc to pick from.

Although this game came out 12.5 years ago, I think it is more than serviceable today. While I've yet to play Orcs Must Die! 3 myself, I've seen the upgrade in graphics/design in some videos, but this game still feels and runs like a newer release.

In terms of what I didn't like, I disliked that if I wanted to refund the in-game currency (skulls), it reset everything. I'd much rather be able to reset individual items instead of having to go through and upgrade the few things I always used and then pick one or two new items. It's a quality of life feature that came up time and time again. Next, I didn't appreciate that several of the achievements require buying the DLCs and first game. I'm of the opinion that achievements should be tied to the base game and at the very most, have some tied to the DLC. But the need to purchase an entire other game (the first one), is a bit of a middle finger to the player. Last, a few times (maybe four times over the course of my 24 hours), the game crashed immediately upon finishing a level. It did save my progress (i.e. it said I completed the level), but that seems like a bug of some sort to me.

I enjoyed my time playing this game and am looking forward to playing the third game in the series. Although I don't appreciate the way certain things were done for this game, the core gameplay loop is a lot of fun.

Yes

Bought it to play with my GF, but co-op doesn't work and the devs don't care enough to fix it... it's been over 12 years since the game came out and it still has connection issues.