Hey, Hivelings! Below is the script to this here video–I just wanted to warn you, some of these jokes are…bad.

Real bad. 

Welcome, folks! Today, I am talking about ORC! Uhm, Orch? That doesn’t sound right….Orcs! NO, that’s an s. Today, I’m talking about O-R-X, all capital – what does it stand for? Bad spelling in video games—it’s an underpaid industry for actual developers, tv gets all the good writers now, at least those who’ve got narrative chops, and, y’know…grammar.

What is ORX?

I wish I knew. It’s weird is wot it is; part gorgeous, cell-shaded fairy-tale background, part card-game, part “Oi I’m a castellan and I shat my pants because this ‘ere horde of post-grammarian orcs has come to burn me keep down.”

Oh, did you think I was doing a serious video on this? After the hour-long lark that was my tell me why critique? Nope! I’m winging it, baby!

This demo was fun—except for the part I pressed the gigantic red button with the grammar anarchist on it, and spawned thirteen waves of orcs all at once. My FPS died, my castles died, but my willingness to collect orc hides and put them up on display over the fireplace lived on, enervated by the tragic pillage of my filthy little feudal peasants. Shame, that—I was just beginning to enjoy the smell of dry hay and fresh manure.

What is the gameplay like? Murder, he wrote: murder of orcs through fortifications that you set up through the use of cards—huzzah, deck building elements make their way onto the channel once more! I am crazy about deck-building, crazy, I say. I think it has to do with my childhood obsession with Yu-Gi-Oh, the World of WarCraft trading-card game and the lack of anyone in my life willing to engage in the actual playing of these games. The beauty of single-player strategy games that pit you against the AI is, you don’t need friends, hah! *the Henderson kid voice* I’ll show you, mum.

There’s a whole lot of board-game DNA here; in the way that the dark outlines of the world lie before you, like the background of a map waiting for you to define the territory through a dozen mosaic pieces or more, interwoven together in real time; and of course, in the gold cost, which reminded me of…Carcassonne, perhaps? A number of board games, anyway—you’ll forgive me if I have pinned something on Carcassonne that it doesn’t do, it’s been ages. The art is what made me glance at ORX but it’s not what kept me playing—the use of cards in the manner described, the preparation for wave after wave of *SCOTTISH* greenskin filth */* certainly made the demo enjoyable.

Perhaps because this is just a demo, it wasn’t particularly well-explained, I thought. No big deal, that—on account of the fact that, well, you’ve got all these cards to pick from, and once you get started, it’s all very intuitive, especially if you come from a background of board games and/or weird deck-building hybrids.

Heh, that’s a pun, that is—because it’s a game in which you build stuff by using a card deck. Ha-ha!  I explained that joke, you see, because all jokes are better when they’re explained.

I enjoyed this short demo of the tower defense deck builder more than I thought I would; if, upon  release, the developer delivers the promise of three-hundred cards across four different factions, and a roguelike campaign which’ll see the player go through three different acts, each within a varying biome—take these, and we might just be looking at something worth sinking dozens of hours into.

There is potential here—now for the developer to stick the landing!

Filip takes a look at the demo of ORX–a video game with a distinct Carcassonne that combines tower defense with deck building mechanics!