Orcs Must Die!
BANGER · Shooter · 2011
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $2.49.
- Length
- 8.3h
- Value
- $0.30/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or ATI Radeon x1950 or better with 256MB VRAM, 5 GB of storage. Windows only.
Slice them, burn them, skewer them, and launch them - no matter how you get it done, orcs must die in this fantasy action-strategy game from Robot Entertainment.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.99. That was February 2016. It has been discounted 85 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today's $2.49 at 75 percent off still sits 152 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
This sale is doing real work. 87 at list, 96 today.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 97 percent of its genre. Among the games closest to it, Orcs Must Die! 2 ($3.74, scores 89) and Orcs Must Die! 3 ($29.99, scores 73) both come in lower.
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $10.82. It costs $2.49.
Critics scored it 83. Players sit 13 points higher at 96 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
5 of the 452 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 84 percent of the 800 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 12 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 8.3 hours; clearing it takes 27, which is 3.3 times the campaign.
The drop-off
93% start to 4% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
20 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Haven't played this in over 14 years! Still holds up very well by today's standards. Any fans of the tower defense genre would enjoy this.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Orcs Must Die! scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/102600/orcs-must-dieThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.