Review: Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion

Posted by Nick K on November 12th, 2013 | 0 Comments | Tags: Orc Attack

Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion is a hack and slash brawler best played with four. Strength in numbers has never rang truer than in the case of this game. It has a nostalgic difficulty to it that is easily confused with frustrating gameplay, although there are times that the line is crossed and the repetitive deaths may lead to frequent load screens and restarts, ending a short play session with a sudden urge to crush the controller and rage quit.

The Orcs have been living a peaceful life, until one day the humans rolled into to town and began polluting the water supply. It’s time for the Orcs to take matters into their own…flatulence. The pollutants have caused the surviving Orcs to have some really bad gas. The subtitle of the game is absolutely perfect. With their flatulence, they will rebel.

As I’ve said, Orc Attack is best played with others. And the game supports up to four players either locally or online. One awesome featured I discovered is that if you play locally, the second, third and fourth players can choose a player profile from the same PS3 to login as. This is a rare feature that maybe a handful or less of games actually use.

Once 1-4 players get into a level, it’s only a matter of seconds before everyone is exposed to the one and only real task — kill hundreds of enemies without getting killed yourself. Mashing the Square button produces a quick slash combo that can be altered with the Triangle button for a heavy attack infused combo. Button mashing is encouraged, but I found repeating an effective combo to be more…well, effective. For me, it was square, square, square, triangle which comboed three quick strikes with a sweeping heavy attack to push back enemies in a 360 degree final blow.

Ironically, the more enemies that are surrounding your Orc, the less they seem to attack. It reminded me of the first Assassin’s Creed, how all the enemies would wait for their one buddy to finish attacking or get killed before delivering an attack themselves. Fortunately for them, if that one human enemy lands an attack, it’s quickly followed up by an attack from another, and another. Using block, combos, and an aerial attack can really help to keep the offensive in the Orc’s court.

Of course, there is always the game’s bread and butter move — flatulence. I should point out that at first this was really an annoying feature, but it quickly grew on me before becoming an integral strategy never to be overlooked during the heat of battle. Delivering the gaseous cloud is simply done with a long press of the L2 button. The gas cloud can then be ignited if a co-op player burps, if there is a fire source from within the level, or the player himself can purchase fire starting sparks that can be deployed when needed.

Since there are four Orcs to choose from, each has a unique ability tucked away inside their gas cloud. For example, the red Orc delivers a fiery blast and the blue Orc’s gas cloud will freeze enemies when ignited, allowing time to attack them with crushing blows. Further cooperative moves like jumping on top of your buddy can help as well. If a buddy goes down, he can be resurrected by having a friendly shake their controller within range. The Orc will perform a Donkey Kong-esque ground pound and magically resurrect his fellow Orc.

Speaking of magic, there is a basic RPG element layered immediately below all the flatulent hack’n slash gameplay. Taking down enemies, collecting gold and gems, conquering the game’s many challenging enemies all contributes to your characters XP. XP that earns level up points good towards leveling several stats such as speed, mana and attack power. Each of the four characters must be leveled up individually. In other words, pick your favorite.

One thing I found to be extremely frustrating about Orc Attack were the menus. My initial instinct was to go for the d-pad to navigate the menus, and as it turns out the d-pad is just not supported. The Orc Attack menus required I use the left analog to navigate. This took me longer to adjust to than it should have. Furthermore, loading into a map from the top down board game style menus is tedious. Overall, going from the menus into gameplay was basically a slow bore. Like the Orcs themselves, the game feels as though it is being dragged through the mud.

I’m divided in my conclusion of Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion simply because when I played with friends locally and online, I had a good time. On the flip side, much of what we were laughing about was not necessarily how cool the cooperative attacks were more than us laughing about how terrible the camera was or how surprisingly difficult a screen full of NPC that don’t attack often can actually be. It’s a tedious and mindless hack’n slash that does harken back to a time when these types of games were the norm. For me, the Orcs just didn’t cut the mustard.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.

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