When comparing Orcs Must Die! Unchained vs Defense Grid: The Awakening, the Slant community recommends Orcs Must Die! Unchained for most people. In the question“What are the best PC Tower Defense games?” Orcs Must Die! Unchained is ranked 3rd while Defense Grid: The Awakening is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Orcs Must Die! Unchained is:
Most tower defense games follow the same formula – you build a bunch of towers and watch enemies slowly get slaughtered by them. The Orcs Must Die franchise steps away from this by allowing you to jump into action yourself. You can choose one of the many heroes and just slash, shoot, and cast spells at the incoming enemies in a third person view. This creates a really fun experience with hardly any downtime at all.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro A great twist on the tower defense genre
Most tower defense games follow the same formula – you build a bunch of towers and watch enemies slowly get slaughtered by them. The Orcs Must Die franchise steps away from this by allowing you to jump into action yourself. You can choose one of the many heroes and just slash, shoot, and cast spells at the incoming enemies in a third person view. This creates a really fun experience with hardly any downtime at all.
Pro Really fun to plan out trap layouts
This game is all about slaying hordes of orcs and other demihumans. To do that you’ll have to set up many traps, including spike traps, tar pits, massive meat grinders, and many others. Your success depends on how well you plan out the layouts, so it feels really satisfying when you make a great death trap.
Pro Quite funny
It's very surprising how lighthearted it feels despite all the blood and death in it. From its cartoony and colorful designs to heroes cracking jokes in the heat of combat and the nonsense orcs spout at you, this game clearly doesn't take itself too seriously. OMDU somehow makes orcs getting dismembered feel funny.
Pro Very nice voice acting
Pro Looks beautiful
Pro Checkpoints in levels
Checkpoints allow for partial level rewind so beginning parts of levels don't need to be played over and over to get to difficult parts.
Pro Can really build some crazy mazes in later levels
Early on you are limited in placement, but in later levels you can and need to build your own mazes to really direct the enemies. There are lots of options/routes/ways to build those mazes so it really opens up a lot of replayability to try and beat your friends scores by tweaking your mazes for maximum points.
Cons
Con Poorly balanced singleplayer
OMDU is primarily designed as a multiplayer game, so you'll have some difficulty when playing alone, especially when just starting out. This is mostly because the enemies have a lot of health, meaning your damage might be too low to take them out on time. There’s also the issue of some levels being quite big, so you might not be able to cover all the paths easily. OMDU is certainly playable on singleplayer but only if you’re up for the challenge.
Con Eventually starts running poorly
Con During early missions you are very limited in tower placements
It gets better though and you can really build some crazy mazes.