It’s a hard life, being an orc—you wake up, you smash puny creatures, you go to bed. But your warlord’s mad at you. Why? Because you got a little too in the zone and broke all the things you were there to steal. That’s a big problem, especially if you’re trying to do things like agriculture or society—in the interest of smashing, obviously.
Don’t Kill Them All makes this the main thrust—or club, whatever floats your boat. It’s a delightfully clever little strategy game wherein you’re having to conduct an easily-ragebaited band of marauding orcs so as not to raze everything that moves.
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It does this by looping everything into a central mechanic: rage. Your orcs can’t die, but they CAN lose their temper—either by taking damage, or by witnessing the destruction of the resources you came to claim, which your enemies can also collaterally tear asunder. If all of your orcs crash out, your expedition’s over and you lose all the resources you came for.
So you do need to do a bit of smashing, but it’s calculated smashing. You’ll be maneuvering your warband to avoid logs and rocks on the tile-based combat grid—or just shoving enemies out of the way so their attacks don’t spoil your, well, spoils. If you’ve ever played Into the Breach, it’s a lot like the collateral damage aspects of that game—just with pure resource-hoarding self-interest rather than the horrible loss of human life.
But where this system really shines is in how it interacts with your attacks. Orcs can theoretically smash as much as possible, but each subsequent usage of an ability (or the first use of an ability, in some cases) ramps up your rage. This means there’s always a devil’s bargain available to close off a combat.
The downside being, rage doesn’t go away between encounters. You need to balance the knife’s edge between gaining rage and pushing further on your expeditions—which themselves cost time, XCOM-style. Time you’ll need for building your base, crafting bonus equipment, or calming your orcs down with a nice mud bath or some herbal tea.
It’s already an extremely promising demo, and it helps that the general art style’s really charming—marrying with the strong theme of “orc really gotta figure out resource management” well. Which is why the current low playercount (in the double digits) is kinda shocking to me, given how solid the core concept is. Orc heartily recommend hidden gem, orc think it gonna be good.
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