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Carcassonne is one of the most popular board games in modern tabletop gaming due to its fun and easy-to-learn tile-laying mechanic and puzzle-like take on city-building. We’re starting to see digital adaptations and games that take inspiration from this approach, such as the upcoming city builder Dorfromantik, but there’s plenty of room for other teams to take a stab at this kind of game. So what does Johnbell’s ORX bring to the table?
ORX is quite a unique blend of strategy subsets and mechanics as it mixes elements of city-builder games, survival and tower defense, and a dash of roguelike meta-game features to top it off. Players will place tessellating tiles on a map from a deck of cards to create roads, villages, castles, guard posts, and various support structures to help keep the rampaging titular orx from reaching the central castle and ensuring your demise. Altogether, the game’s design primarily relies on its city-builder and survival mechanics to carry the day.
The roguelike systems primarily center around deck-building and completing dedicated mission challenges, which will grant players additional cards and options to work within any given run. While there’s a limited persistent reward feature at play between each run, it’s by no means as developed or in-depth in comparison with more dedicated roguelike strategy games like Loop Hero.
Getting straight to the point, I haven’t seen anything quite like ORX, ranging from its solid presentation, fresh mix of strategy mechanics, and addictive level of challenge.
ORX’s strategy mechanics blend together extremely well, creating a rich strategic and tactical experience, despite its relatively small scale. There are four major features that all work well in tandem: sense of tension from resisting evolving waves of orx, critical long-term decision-making with deck-building, enticing tactical puzzle challenges in laying out an effective defensive blueprint, and finally tactical adaptation due to elements of randomness, such as card draw.
Of the four major systems, perhaps the two lattermost mechanics highlight the game’s quality the most as they ask players to think creatively and with foresight in planning out the abstract geometry of their fortifications, while also adjusting on the fly to the consistent curveballs that need to be dealt with. This gameplay core is really shaping up nicely and the roguelike and greater meta-game mechanics add that extra icing on the cake to keep you strategically invested.
Not only is there plenty to do within each mission across multiple decision-making levels, ORX’s near-perfect mechanical balance leads to an addictive level of challenge. The players’ struggle to utilize their resources effectively to stave off the hordes of orx will hook you in such a way that you’ll want to come back to it over and over again.
It also helps that restarting a run is quick and easy, so there’s little barrier to having fun while failing and consistently learning and developing as a player in the process. Balancing, both in regard to in-game tools and interaction of systems, is one of the crucial components of creating a successful strategy game and ORX seems to be hitting its balancing dead-center.
Looking to the game’s future, the developers promise to have four factions at launch, each with its own set of cards and unique mechanics that will only increase ORX’s replayability even further and add extra tactical decision-making options. Also, each run will have several acts of missions that will progressively increase the already high difficulty level and stack up even more content to sink your teeth into.
Despite the game’s solid foundations, ORX’s solid game design it does have a few issues regarding its polish – an enviable position for any game, especially before release. There is an assortment of typos and spelling mistakes in some tooltips that makes understanding the game’s information an unnecessary hassle. A more pressing matter is that not all systems are adequately explained and there are even some hidden interactions that will only add layers of unnecessary confusion and frustration.
ORX is shaping up to be an impressive small-scale strategy game with great sub-genre hybridization and a fresh mix of features. The game’s overall flow definitely gives plenty of Into the Breach vibes in its art style, pace, and level of difficulty – a great place to be.
There are a few kinks and rough edges that need smoothing out, but otherwise, ORX has a great gameplay foundation that’s both accessible to new players and interesting to veterans. This one’s definitely worth keeping on your radar.
A Steam key was provided by PR for the purposes of this preview
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