Of Orcs And Men

There was still one more older Spiders game I was slightly interested in: Of Orcs And Men (2012) that Spiders co-developed with Cyanide Studio. The latter went on to make two prequels to it later on -- the Styx stealth games I have already played.

Somewhat unconventional fantasy ARPG

The game's story premise is a war between humans and orcs. The humans have been expanding into the orcs' lands and enslaved a lot of them while at it. An orc legion Bloodjaws wants to put an end to it by assassinating the emperor of humankind. A handful of orcs are sent on this mission on their separate ways, including a burly warrior Arkail who gets the already mentioned goblin rogue Styx as his guide.

Of Orcs And Men has an unusual setup for a third person action roleplaying game by having you control two characters simultaneously. You can switch the between Arkail and Styx at will and queue up to four abilities for each to execute. You need to do that too if you want optimal performance because the characters will not take proper advantage of their available abilities on their own. Arkail in his defensive stance in particular is very bad at it, often not doing anything at all without you telling him to. To give yourself time to consider tactics in the thick of things, you can slow time to a crawl. It's not quite a total pause but it's close.

I could see the influence of World of Warcraft in Of Orcs And Men. Most of Arkail's abilities are powered by rage that decays to 0 outside combat while Styx uses constantly regenerating concentration. At low health Arkail goes into berserk, making you unable to control him. While berserking he can attack Styx too although it's not the end as long as Arkail survives the encounter. Both characters also have an ability revive to each other in the middle of combat.

Like in the prequels, Styx has the ability to stealth and assassinate people. On the game's harder difficulties you always want to do that to thin enemy ranks as much as possible before unavoidable combat. The developers left that activity slightly easier than you'd expect because enemies don't react to assassinated corpses. You can save the game at any time when not in combat to make sure you don't botch possible assassination spree too soon.

Not a walk in the park

On Easy difficulty you can have Arkail be an offensive fighter but on Extreme he is absolutely required to be built as a tank, leaving Styx as the sole damage dealer. I played on the maximum difficulty for Steam achievements and the game was quite challenging at times. That wasn't a big surprise though -- Spiders' titles tend to be that.

There were few parts of noteworthy difficulty. The first one was when the game forces you into a gauntlet as solo Arkail without gear. Styx joins him at the end but even then fighting four berserkers required some extensive kiting. The hardest fight was the very last boss. I had to try it four times before I beat it. It was made more irksome due to most of the cutscene in the middle of it being unskippable. Having to watch the same thing in each attempt was irritating.

The trick to defeating the boss on Extreme is to first kill one of the two berserkers he has resurrected and then focus on the boss, using Arkail's best stunning abilities while Styx burns the boss down. It sounds simple but it's also easy to fail at. The boss might resist the stuns or Arkail could get stunned himself by the berserkers. If the boss manages to bring the berserker back up and/or resurrect the other two corpses in the room, or even heal himself, it's usually game over because you have no health for a prolonged fight.

Of Orcs And Men would have benefited from a detailed combat log. The game does have some floating combat text but it doesn't exactly state why your connecting attacks sometimes seem to do so very little or why an ability with "100% chance to stun" is far from having that perfect stun rate.

I didn't expect the game to be great but I think it could have been a lot more fun with little more work. The levels are terribly linear, for instance. Spiders and Cyanide could have easily added secrets that would have required Styx to crawl through stuff more or Arkail smash things open. Or being able to use the throw goblin ability for things outside combat.

Also, by default Of Orcs And Men has a field of vision of 45 degrees according to the info on PC Gaming Wiki which is amazingly narrow even for a third person game. The process of widening it is straightforward enough when following instructions on the wiki though. It merely requires some unpacking and repacking with 7zip to edit the value.