Orc Incremental is an engaging idle game that will have you building an army of fantasy creatures as you try to conquer a seemingly endless amount of realms that grow ever so difficult to push through. It claims to be heavily inspired by WarCraft II, and honestly, yeah I can see what they mean with its handcrafted retro art style.
I’ve clocked in over 70 hours and have been letting it progress on the side as I go through The Blood of Dawnwalker, and here are my thoughts on it.
NOTE: I received a review copy of the game prior to release, but I definitely would have gotten it after hearing Jesse Cox go on about it on The Geekenders lol.
Incremental Enjoyment
For fans of idle games, you’ve got a lot to grind for in Orc Incremental. It’s basically an auto-battler on steroids, and the fact that you have to constantly adjust your unit composition and positioning makes it far more engaging than I initially thought it’d be.
Now, it’s nowhere near an RTS in that regard, but there is a bit of strategy involved in contending with the RNG unit acquisition method and recognizing what to buy first to efficiently go through the levels.
The gameplay loop is basically just: Buy units > Upgrade their stats > Get as far as you can go > Reset & Repeat
If you’re just upgrading anything and everything with your hard-earned gold, you’ll find yourself stalling early. On the other hand, going for the right upgrades for whatever mishmash of orcs, spellcasters, creatures, and more that you’ve acquired will let you blast through and quickly amass a lot of “Blight” (the rebirth/prestige currency).
I won’t claim that it’s any more complex than that, but you don’t really have to ask for much more in a game like this. It’s basically something you run on the side and occasionally interact with to grow more powerful with just time.
Power Fantasy Guaranteed
Since I had a pre-release copy of Orc Incremental, I actually decided to hold off on writing my review until it released. This is because of all the WIP assets that I ran into much earlier than I expected, and I anticipated some major balance changes when it finally came out.
Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened just a day or two after its official release. Progression in the game felt much slower back then due to varying reasons, be it certain units being too weak or upgrades not feeling impactful enough.
With the post-release patches, they’ve addressed those points by buffing a lot of stuff, and you’ll find that getting all the fun stuff shouldn’t take much time at all. Now, you can watch your army rip through the levels with relative ease for a while longer when you would have already hit multiple walls in the earlier versions.
There’s a mechanic in the game called “Warpath” in which your army will just keep going if they clear a wave without any of your troops dying, and you get rewarded with a lot of money relative to how far they make it. As I’m writing this, I’m already 200+ levels deep in a single Warpath, which I couldn’t even imagine had the recent patches not existed.
Plenty of Room for More
The game is pretty simple at its core, but the devs have definitely left a lot of room to improve not just on its systems but in variety. With specific tags for unit types (and pretty much a single entry for “Creature”), I can see them adding a whole lot more of stuff to play with over time.
With how fast they’ve been pumping out patches and responding to user feedback, it won’t surprise me if they’re already cooking stuff up behind the scenes.
As it stands, Orc Incremental is a nice little idler that you can leave on the side while working or playing other games, and it has more than enough content to last you a long time before it gets truly stale, especially with its large rebirth meta-progression skill tree.
I won’t drag this on for more, as there’s only so much you can really say about a game like this. Just know that I’m still hooked, and I’ll keep running this on the side until I find something else to occupy that niche. It hasn’t overstayed its welcome this far in, so it’ll definitely be a while before that happens!