Orx early access review

I must admit, there are some genres of video game I don’t really play a lot of. I could play platformers and JRPGs until the cows come home, but because of that some genres don’t get much of a look in. How am I supposed to find time to play a compelling tower defence game when I’m busy grinding away on random battles or finding every last shiny collectable in a colourful world? Thankfully I found the time to dive headfirst into the Early Access build of ORX, which blends tower defence gameplay and deck building to create a really unique game.

In ORX you play as a faction of humans trying to survive wave after wave of attacks from the titular baddies. To do this you’ll need to build a selection of defences out of the cards you draw at the bottom of the screen. This is much easier said than done though, because this isn’t your traditional tower defence game.

You don’t just get towers to place in ORX, you get castle pieces. By combining multiple castle walls and corridors together you’ll create one complete castle that fires arrows at incoming baddies, and the power of said castle varies based on the cards you used to create it. You can probably survive the first couple of waves of enemies with castles made of two small walls snapped together, but when the ORX start bringing out special units and bosses you’ll need sprawling defences powered up by rune cards to buff their abilities.

There are more than just castle pieces in that deck too. The different buildings all have their own handy abilities, and there are paths that can help join your kingdom together. Villages and farms are extremely important to build early on, as they bring in extra gold which you need to play more cards. Without them the money flows pretty slowly, so balancing your kingdom is key.

Roads are important to join all your buildings together so they function correctly, but they’re also important for reaching vaults placed around the map. Once you build next to a vault you’ll unlock it and be given mini objectives, which if you manage to accomplish will grant you powerful new cards for your deck permanently. Since these last for a full run, making sure you unlock every vault is just as important as surviving the ORX.

Between missions you’ll have the opportunity to upgrade your deck, by either upgrading, removing or enchanting different cards. You can choose different routes through a chapter in a similar way to something like Slay the Spire, with each route offering different options to improve the power of your kingdom via the power of cards.

It may sound like ORX has some roguelike DNA making up its video game genetics, but don’t worry if you’re not a fan of the genre because there’s no permadeath. If (or let’s face it when) you fail a mission you’re welcome to retry it as many times as you like with no punishment at all.

It’s fair to say that ORX is a pretty complex game, and buddy you don’t know the half of it. The first of the two current factions (the Rune Wardens) play with the aforementioned castle pieces to create arrow shooting defences, but playing as the Desert Reavers is like playing a different game entirely.

As the Desert Reavers you place Barracks to train your soldiers, then every time you put down a building in range of it a little platoon of warriors is spawned on a random tile. It’s pretty wild how differently every aspect of the game works when you play as this second faction, and at full release there will be four of them available.

I think ORX is looking very promising so far, but in its current state it does (understandably) have some issues. There’s no playable tutorial to speak of, just a few screens of text and pictures that pop up when you first start a level, and it’s simply not enough. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out how all of the intricate systems work together, and I can’t imagine everyone will have the patience to do that without much in the way of guidance.

I’d also say that at the time of writing the balance of the game feels a little off. I spent a huge amount of time trying to beat the first Act as the Rune Wardens and got absolutely flattened every step of the way. Then when playing as the Desert Reavers I didn’t lose a single battle, and never felt particularly threatened that it might happen. This could easily be updated before release, but was very jarring.

My entire time playing ORX was on Steam Deck, and the game ran really well on the handheld that everybody’s talking about. You will have to be fairly comfortable with the trackpad to play effectively, but when choosing cards and placing them on the map the action pauses which is really helpful if you’re a little slow.

ORX has a lot of potential to be a unique and entertaining game when it hits 1.0, but it’s fair to say it has a few issues currently. If you think the concept sounds like something you’d love then by all means get in on the ground floor, but be prepared to deal with a lot of learning on the job.