Orc Incremental review - an incremental auto battler inspired by classic Warcraft

Orc Incremental is a fresh release from developer Nice Ride and publisher Playsaurus that sets you on a path of orcs versus humans with auto-battling. Disclosure: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

This is a genre that seems to be gaining some extra popularity lately, with a lot of developers trying their hand at something resembling an incremental game. For those who don't quite know what that means - the whole idea behind the genre is repetition and upgrading to keep progressing through it. Some games in the genre have you click cookies, others make you clear up leaves and Orc Incremental has you throw a brutish orc army at a bunch of humans across stages with an increasing challenge.

What makes this one a little more unique and interesting is that it uses a random card-draw system. As you go through battles you'll earn gold and then to build up and strength your army, you need to spend that gold to pull a new card - which could be a unit to fight or a totem to give you passive powers. Each time you draw a card, the cost then increases for the next one which is part of where the loop comes in.

After that, you position your units into whatever formation you want, and that formation on top of your units and powers could be what wins you the battle. So with that in mind, there's a little bit of strategy actually involved here too. It also blends in a bit of the idle genre (as a lot of incremental games do) as you can leave battles running over and over, to accrue lots of gold until you end up with an almighty-tall mountain of it. Glorious. If a battle is currently too difficult, or you really want to absolutely annihilate later battles, you can choose to go back to earlier battles and lock it there until you're ready.

On top of that, during the actual battles you have various passive upgrades you can also spend gold on like more health for your units, you can power up your active spell to unleash, add more damage for specific unit types and so on. There's a fair amount of click-click-click at times while your units slice through the enemy army by themselves.

Something else it does to keep you going and wanting more is like a prestige system. You will reach a point where your army simply isn't good enough, so you go through what it calls a Dark Rebirth. This resets your entire run, but you get to keep various permanent bonuses (like damage and health) and begin to unlock new units and challenges previously unavailable to you. Each Dark Rebirth gives you a certain amount of the Blight resource, which you use to power through the rather massive unlock tree.

It does take quite a long time to get through with the Dark Rebirth system, but the longer you proceed through a run, the more of this Blight you will get to spend. So again, it's all about that repeating loop.

See the launch trailer below:

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One really nice touch is the offline progression system. I mentioned how you can just leave battles going, and battles will continue when you're on the formation / card draw screen - but you can also just shut down the game, walk away and come back later to see your progress has continued in that time. A message will pop-up letting you know how much extra gold you gained while you weren't there. Sleeping on it is actually necessary to get through it, you simply don't have enough time in the day for it - which feels super odd to say about a video game, to tell you to walk away from it and go to bed.

Played on Fedora KDE 44 (Desktop Linux) with Proton 11 - it runs perfectly.

I think if incrementals are your sort of thing, it's a worthy entry into the genre but I do wish it had just a few more tactical choices to really give the battles just a bit more life. Especially with the gameplay loop with the resets especially, it would have removed a bit of tedium to it when the early battles are just so slow.

A game of no-stress, that is surprisingly relaxing to click through. I enjoyed it a lot more than expected actually, especially the later battles with a lot more units on the field, as my Demonic Extractors worked overtime running around collecting all the gold.

Overall - it's a nice take on the incremental genre that has some unique mechanics blended together that will take up plenty of your time and at only £6.99 it has a good price to it. Some lovely artwork too - their artists clearly love classic Warcraft 2 which they were inspired by, the pixel detail in all the units is pretty impressive actually. A great second-screen game for sure.