Orcs Review

Video games are a bit cruel to orcs. The race is often typecast as a pack of violent, under-educated war mongers with a thing about dressing in animal furs. But even video games can’t deny that orcs have amazing work ethic. Indeed, David Zobrist’s Orcs is a cookie-clicker game meant to celebrate orcish stick-to-itiveness.

Orcs begins when a ship full of the green-skinned dudes wrecks on the shore of a strange new world. What’s an orc to do except build a new stronghold and invade neighboring kingdoms? And that’s exactly what these orcs have in mind - but to build a new empire, they need timber. Tons of it.

Being a clicker game, Orcs simply requires you to tap the screen over and over. As you do so, the 8-bit orc at the front and center of the action swings his axe at a tree. The faster you tap, the faster he swings – and the more wood you get (go ahead and get all those giggles out of your system).

As you collect wood you can hire more orcs to help out (which gradually adds to your wood pile - the more orcs you have at work, the more wood accumulates every second), and you can upgrade your axe to yield more wood with each swing. Working quickly earns you point multipliers, so frantic tapping yields some serious accumulations. The Great Thunder Lord rewards those that work hard!

Orcs also includes quests, which is a unique feature to have in a clicker game. Your wood totals can go towards training and funding orc warriors that harass human villages and pick up massive wood bonuses. These battle sequences are automatic, but still fun to observe. Unfortunately there are only a few to work through, although more are supposedly coming in a future update.

If you’re okay the the simplicity and repetition inherent to clicker games, then there are only two flaws of note in Orcs. First, the sound bites. They’re endless, repetitious, and can’t be turned off, even though the game’s music can. Go figure.

Second, ads occasionally pop up and you’re helpless not to click them for obvious reasons. Thus begins the drawn-out process of backing out of the ad and returning to the game. Thankfully a recent update cut down on the ads, but they’re still present and being “forced” into tapping them is, frankly, kind of scummy.

What can be expected from a game about orcs, though? They’re the fantasy world’s bandits and mercenaries. Or are they? Maybe we’re all too tough on the big guys. Orcs helps you warm up to its titular race - even if they are kind of chatty and flatulent.