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Game Title: Orc Slayer
Platform: PlayStation 4
Developer: Cooply Solutions
Publisher: Cooply Solutions
Genre: First Person Shooter
Age Rating: PEGI: 7+
Release Date: 19th July 2016
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Game Score: 3.0/10
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Summery:
The Orcs bring you a massively broken mess of a game that even for the small price you would want to slay this game instead.
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You know the kind of games that are so bad you want to avoid and stay away from them but however there are some bad games out there that we can't help but find a seriously bad game that you end up laughing so hard at just how bad a game is. Orc Slayer is one of those games. Originally a PC game on Steam back in 2015 it comes to PS4 a year later and you would think it would receive care and polish for it's console release, however you realize there was no polish or effort that makes a very unstable port.
So in anycase Orc Slayer is a first person shooter that is set in a medieval world where everybody in the town is gone and you take revenge on the orcs by travelling through 13 of the game's levels shooting them down with a crossbow. You'll go through each of the levels shooting waves of enemies till they stop spawning letting you move onwards, this is similar to Serious Sam and the Doom 2016 game where it focuses more on the old school shooting mechanics and gameplay style but however in a not so good fashion. You do get a set of power ups like fire arrows, electric arrows and a magic blast which deal decent damage I guess, you also start out with an axe as well which is mainly useful for cutting down blockades and you also have a torch which is mainly useless because there is plenty of light in the game. As for enemies there are the regular orcs, armoured orcs which take more hits, orcs which hit you with magic that either reverses your controls for a few seconds or damages you over time and then there are the big orcs which have to be shot in their uncovered spot to damage them.
When you move to a part of the next area you have to shoot down waves of respawning enemies like I said before and there can be dozens spawning in at you from multiple directions, yeah cause a game is fair when you have enemies spawning in behind you without you realizing it. There can be dozens of enemies closing in at you that you end up taking plenty of damage and sometimes the area you are in leaves you outnumbered with little to room to manoeuvre. You do get a minigun weapon which does help in clearing out the orcs but you don't get it in every level.
The enemy is also very dumb half of the time as well, while they are deadly in groups but end up hugging the walls and also end up getting stuck on the level geometry. This is where many of the games issues comes into play, the cheapness of the enemies and the performance problems this game has. Now like I said before the game is rather cheap when it comes to enemy placement and spawning, enemies can spawn behind you and also there can be dozens of enemies coming in at you. You can try and pick em off behind cover but however don't stay too long or else the pigbooms will appear behind you and explode dealing damage to you. Yeah, that's just cheap game. What is funny is their animations, their animation is very stiff but the way they fall over is comical and there is a rare moment where a dead orc will actually fly over. When you do kill an enemy they will drop an item which gives you experience points and when you get enough of them you'll gain an upgrade point which you use to upgrade your crossbow damage, your magic, your reload speed and your health. I have learned that there is a glitch where if you don't upgrade your health but bring up the upgrade menu and attempt to the health upgrade with no upgrade points it fully replenishes your health and you can do this as many times as you like. Also if you are dealing with dozens of enemies you have to make sure you get the experience points before they disappear and with dozens of enemies on screen that can be a chore.
The stages are not that well designed. The first few areas have mostly just a straight forward and they are just simple medieval inspired villages and camp areas but then when you get to stage 8 the cheapness accelerates. Enemies endlessly respawn giving you little space to move around and on top of some spawning behind you it makes the stage just difficult and you can end up dying easily. Stage 9 has a boss fight against the general who is rather easy to beat, just clear out the enemies, block him with an obstacle and keep shooting at him. He'll get stuck which will make this fight extremely easy. It gets worse, stage 10 has you fighting waves of enemies in a castle with small corridor environment and if you end up getting pushed into a corner you'll end up losing a lot of health and there is little you can do about it. Stage 11 has way more dozens of enemies thrown at you at once which makes survival difficult and it's the same issue on stage 13. Here's the kicker, when you die you restart the level all over again or if you can make it through respawn at the checkpoint and the game goes on without consequence with the enemies remaining in one area which is odd but helpful regardless.
The game's final boss is the worst of all. He has tons of health and keeps on spawning his skeleton minions and his attacks hurt quite a lot. When I fought him it felt like it was going on forever cause I was shooting at him for over an hour. I can't explain this very well but I reckon if you die against him as much as it spawns you at the boss battle and the boss is at the same spot on the arena as you died it's health goes back to full. I had to grind up on experience points to even beat the boss by which then the game crashed but however I still managed to get some upgrade points from the fight as well as a few more just to make the fight easier. That fight shall I say folks was just unfairly cheap.
The game is already bad enough and now I got the mention the overall performance. I already mentioned some of the glitches like the enemies getting stuck on the level geometry but the game has other performance problems. When they are enemies on screen the frame rate chops down like crazy and of course the game does frequently crash up as well. The game also drops in frame rate when the minigun is fired which makes using it difficult to handle. Another bug I did notice is the awful hit detection where sometimes the bolts pass through enemies and not hitting them even when the crosshair is directly on one. Another thing also that the bolts can actually get stuck in mid-air which makes the shooting even worse. This game is run on the Unity engine which is the go to engine for indie developers and graphics aren't all that special and the sound effects and music aren't really that impressive either. I also find it bizarre while under the spell of inverted you can see strange colour changes with the ocean.
What it amounts to is that Orc Slayer plays like an unfinished product. I know that this is an indie game and that it was done by a small team under a small budget but there still needs to be some kind of quality control and the necessary time to polish it. It's broken, it's full of bugs and glitches, it looks bad, sounds bad and even plays bad. There is little redeeming features to the game aside from you can beat this game and easily get a platinum trophy in just 5 hours which is easy to do. It may cost ￡ 3.99 on the PSN store which is cheap yes, but however there are way better games you should be playing instead. It may be buggy and glitchy but nowhere near as that then King Kong on the Nintendo DS.
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The Good Points:
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1. Hilarious AI action
The Bad Points:
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1. Dozens of bugs and glitches
2. Terrible frame rate and performance
3. Cheap and unfair enemy placement
4. It's short and only has 13 levels
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Reviewed by: Anthony Hayball (AQWBlaZer91)
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