Humans Vs Orcs – Review
Even though big triple-A productions can blow us away, like the recently released SAROS, we often fall back to smaller indie games to unwind after a busy day. Some of these small titles often have very simple components that are perfect for zoning out with. This brings us to Humans Vs Orcs, which seemed like a fun and easy title to get into. We decided to give the game a go, only to find an unfinished, bland, and uninspired mess.
Story
There is absolutely no story present in Humans Vs Orcs. You just start the game, and you play until you pretty much give up. It would have been nice to have a text blurb or two when playing the game, but it seems even that was too much effort. Then again, the human vs orcs conflict has been milked dry in so many games that most players could fill in the blanks themselves.
Graphics
The graphics are nothing to truly write home about. The game has around a dozen pixelated character and enemy sprites that have limited animations. These sprites don’t look too bad, but there’s a lot better pixel art out there in similar games. The backdrops are AI-generated, lack variety, look blurry, and are just still images. The animations themselves also don’t look horrible, but everything here just screams: ‘cheap’.
Sound
The sound design isn’t much better here. You’ll have some music variety, but even then, everything loops so quickly that you’ll eventually just turn the music off. The same can be said about the SFX, which are functional but extremely basic. Looking at the very limited scope of the game itself, we doubt the developers could have done much more with the soundscape.
Gameplay
Humans Vs Orcs calls itself a strategy game, while we would probably call it a mobile game port with some button-pressing elements. You are basically thrown into the game, where you have buttons that you can press that correspond to purchasing units. When you have enough money, you can buy a unit, and then you have to wait for the purchase cooldown. As you progress during a run, you can buy passive upgrades with the gold you accrue. In between runs, you can also purchase passive upgrades that make you stronger, grant you additional units, and even remove progress blocks.
Outside of the game requiring you to press a few buttons and do some skill upgrades in between levels or runs, there is literally no other content. The developers tried to make it seem you are actually working towards something by adding artificial progress blocks in the game, where dragons spawn that instantly kill you. To then pass that block, you’ll have to use skulls that you collect during a run to get rid of this blockage. When you have gotten rid of the dragon blocks, they will still spawn, still deal unblockable damage, but you won’t die instantly. When you die during a run, you can still retry the wave you were currently trying to tackle. Even so, with all the upgrades unlocked, you’ll eventually still hit a wall that’s almost impossible to break through. We were also not sure how to actually use all our available units, as we kept unlocking new unit types, but when buying additional spawning slots, we would always get the same units over and over again. There is no explanation to be found for this inside the game, and it’s clear that this ‘final product’ has never been tested at all.
Conclusion
While Humans Vs Orcs could have been an addictive little title thanks to its concept, it ends up being a failed mess. The game has no redeeming qualities, as there is barely any content, there are attacks that you simply cannot stop, some features seem to be missing, and there is simply nothing to motivate you to keep going. Even the beginning of the game was tedious, and we only continued playing because this was sadly a title that ended up in our mailbox. If you’re looking for a fun, casual title to play, this one really is not it.
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