It’s a common trend that we humans tend to be the enemy in any kind of game where you take the role of a non-human hero, or anti-hero, and Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion is no different. This time we have started polluting the homeland of the orcs and as a “funny” side-effect they now have disgusting flatulence, because who doesn’t like hours of gameplay built around farts…sigh. Welcome to the world of Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion.

Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion is the first release from the new development studio, Casual Brothers, and I really hope this first title isn’t a shape of games to come because, quite frankly, Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion is a diabolic mess of a game. To their credit though they seem to be aware that a game full of farts isn’t every bodies cup of tea and give you the choice of playing “Dirty”, farts and burps included, or “Clean” in which magic takes place of the toilet humour.

You choose to play as one of four orc warriors, Friar Krap, Lord Poop, Doc Turd or Sir Snif , and set off on your way to battle through wave after wave of human enemies in order to reclaim the orcs homeland and save their race from extinction. Each of the orc differs in appearance and come fully loaded with unique elemental attacks including poisonous burps or flame-spewing breath. Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion also gives basic weapons to begin with that can be used as quick, duel-welded object or combined for more power two-handed weapons.

Attacks are mapped to two buttons and provide a weak and strong attack option. Weak attacks deal less damage but strike quicker leaving you less open to an opponents own attack. Strong attacks are slow but deal greater damage. It’s basic but it works. With two types of weapon attacks you’d think this will allow you to perform some fun and devastating combo attacks right? I’m afraid not. The combat system is poorly implemented and never really feels like your have any weight behind your attack, earning new combos adds nothing either. They just aren’t intuitive nor powerful enough to be a worthwhile mechanic.

The framerate also takes a huge hit when you’re in battle. On nearly every occasion I experienced the game slowing down, often to a stop, while I was in mid combo or about to take on a wave of enemies. This just takes away the flow of the game away and adds yet more frustration to an already bad experience.

Enemies are another major flaw. While they come out in force, from random buildings or holes in the walls, they never feel like anything more than an inconvinience. Sure, they’ll occasionally counter a move or have a shield you’ll need to bash through, but for the most part they stand around aimlessly while only a couple attack you at once. They can take a punch though and whenever I died it was more due to frustration that they wouldn’t die than anything else.

When they do die enemies drop chunks of gold, health or mana for you to pick up as well as earning your orc a little experience giving the games slight RPG element. Leveling up can be done after each level on the map screen and can be improved in the basic ways, power, defence, agility and mana, none of which seem to make much different to your character in all honesty. You’ll also find a store on the map screen where you can use the gold earned to buy yourself health potions, a necklace that revives you, new weapons, shields and masks. These help a lot more and getting a better weapon really can destroy countless enemies far easier, as well as adding a bit of customisation to your orc.

The camera places itself where it wants and if you have a problem with that, well…..it doesn’t care. It’s not moving unless you move somewhere else and that’s not always possible such as on an escort mission where the camera has decided to give me a view of my helpless friend behind me, while objects are coming at me from in front of the screen. There are no options for a manual camera and that’s inexcusable in the modern era, especially for a game of this type where you’re in a 3D environment with enemies coming from all directions giving you cheap deaths and easily missable health and mana items. Often it felt like I’d picked up my dusty original PlayStation console and popped in a poor generic platformer. This is further infuriating when you realise the right thumbstick is used very rarely for a pathetic ground and pound move that simply exists to lower bridges or cages to further your progress.

Also adopted from a few generations ago are end of level boss battles. Well ok, I’m being a little harsh there, we still have them in some titles nowadays, but it’s been a while since I’ve played a game that made me feel like they were an obvious end of level boss and I actually found it quite refreshing, though maybe that’s just nostalgia talking. But as much as I enjoyed the prospect of a boss battle, the fights themselves are a chore. A long, boring, uninspired chore. You’ll face a variety of enemies such as giant orcs, giant robots, giant snowmen, giant weird-egypt-things…..basically it’s all giant. They’ll have a very obvious attack pattern with a few options scattered around to help in your attack of the hideous beast. Usually these will come in the form of a firefly. Fart on this when the enemy is in position will freeze them and leave them open to attack. It sounds easy enough, but these drag on and on and that only gets longer when the boss smashes one of your attack options leaving your only choice as melee and run.

On a slightly better note though is the co-op mode. Playing with up to 4 friends, either local or online, is great fun and you can play through the entire campaign in co-op. Boss battles get easier, the enemies die faster, you can laugh at farts together, you get the idea. It’s not all good news though as the addition of a player means the framerate, once again, suffers terribly and if you dare to try online you’ll be stuck with even longer load times and framerate drops bad enough to rage quit.

I cannot recommend Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion to anybody. I know this is supposed to be just dumb fun, but there’s ways of doing that right. Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death is a dumb game, but that was an incredibly fun, even with it’s flaws. Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion is just bad. If you’re after toilet humour, it’s been done better before, if you’re after hack n slash, it’s been done better countless times. Just this year Deadpool was released which has a ton of toilet humour and enemies, and that was a blast. Even though that was a full retail game I’d still recommend spending the extra and buying that instead or almost any other option on XBLA, PSN or Steam would be a better use of your money than this.

You can buy Orc Attack: Flatulent Rebellion now for $9.99/£6.75 and is available to download for PlayStation 3, PS Vita, Xbox 360 and PC.

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