The thing that killed this game for me was the way to select and place units. Before beginning a level, the player must select the units he or she wants to use and hire them using gold. The sad thing is that there isn’t a set amount of gold for each level. Instead, gold is accumulated during as the game progresses. This means that a poor performance in one level can hurt you in the next one. A solution to this is probably to hire fewer units and rely only ones that will be the most beneficial. However, this system can still completely cripple a player once you factor in Tools of War. Tools of War are powerful weapons like bombs that a player can use in a battle. The problem with them is that they each have an in game cost in addition to the price of the initial purchase.
Essentially, the player must pay gold each time he or she wants to use a ToW. If someone were to use to many ToW’s, it is likely that they would be harmed in later levels. I ran into this same issue when I used too many bombs in a level. From that point on I had to work with a short supply of gold. To see just how badly someone could be screwed over by this system, I purposely tried to bankrupt myself by using as many bombs as I could. I managed to use up almost all of my gold and could only hire the basic knight for the next level. This issue wouldn’t be so bad if Orczz had a level select option. The only way to correct such a mistake is to start the game again from the beginning, which would delete any current progress and achievements.
Yet nothing in Orczz irritates me more than the unit placement mechanics. To build a unit, the player need only click on a unit’s portrait on the top of the screen and then place it in a lane. However, instead of using a kind of currency system, the developers chose to limit unit placement by using cool downs alone. This by itself isn’t that bad. The real problem is that when one unit is placed, the cool downs for ALL of the units are reset. As a result, a player can only build a single unit every ten to twenty seconds. Such delays can be deadly when the horde is in full swing. While playing this game, I would often notice a large number of Orcs in a lane that had lost its defenders. I would immediately place a defender in the lane, but it would die almost instantly.
Since the cool down had not finished yet, I could only watch as the Orcs marched into my castle. The fact of the matter is that this mechanic makes Orczz virtually impossible to play. A currency based system would have been far better. That way, a person could build any number of units as long as they had enough money. Another way would be to incorporate a “global cooldown” which prevents units from being placed within a set amount of time from each other. The player would at least have the option to build a different unit without being able to place them in rapid succession. Regardless of what other games do, the current system in Orczz is flawed at best.
