There Are No Orcs

I came into There Are No Orcs expecting a thin auto-battler dressed up in roguelite clothing, and I left with a note to myself that said 'just one more run' crossed out six times. BaseTrade Studio has built something that sits at a surprisingly precise crossroads: tile-based base construction, tug-of-war lane combat, and roguelite run structure, all compressed into sessions that run roughly 30 minutes to 90 minutes depending on difficulty and how badly you want to optimize your farm-windmill adjacency chain. The mechanical core is placement synergy. You are not clicking on units or issuing move orders. You are deciding where a barracks goes relative to a gold producer, whether a culture building earns its tile slot, and how your chosen commander's four exclusive structures fit into the grid. That last point is where the depth actually lives. Thirty commanders across three factions, Humans, Dwarves, and Demons, each pull the game in a genuinely different direction. Humans are the readable starting point: buildings do what their tooltips say and the economy is linear. Demons tie all production to a shared pulse timer, which rewards players who understand bursting. Dwarves are the late-game faction with a complicated economy that can snowball into an overwhelming front line, or collapse embarrassingly if you misread the build order. That asymmetry is real, not cosmetic. For strategy newcomers worried this is too complex: it is not. The tutorial explains adjacency bonuses clearly, runs are short enough that a loss costs you thirty minutes not three hours, and there is no multiplayer to intimidate you. The comparison to Thronefall and games in that approachable-but-thoughtful lane is fair. Where the game earns its criticism is in the roguelite layer itself. Relics, the primary run modifier, are hard to acquire and frequently offset their own power with equal penalties, which flattens the power-fantasy highs that make the best roguelites addictive. Equipment progression suffers from similar stat-bloat blandness: small numerical bonuses that rarely change how you think about a run. Players who came for Slay the Spire-level build expression will find the itemization disappointing. Players who came for a clean, readable strategy loop with real faction variance will find exactly that. Post-launch support has been steady. BaseTrade shipped equipment filter improvements, new commanders, and bug patches within weeks of release. Steam Workshop is not present, which is the only thing I would flag as a genuine long-term concern for replay ceiling. Without mod support, the content cap becomes visible eventually, especially for players who clear all three factions and push through Chaos difficulty modifiers, where maps gain stacked effects like universal lifesteal or percentage HP multipliers on enemies. Chaos mode is where the game gets legitimately hard and, frankly, more interesting. At its price point, the value arithmetic is straightforward. Getting 10 to 20 hours out of it through faction experimentation and commander unlocks is realistic for anyone who clicks with the loop. If you need deep roguelite progression or a mod ecosystem to sustain interest past that, the ceiling will show. If you want a tight, well-made strategy game you can learn in one sitting and replay for a month, There Are No Orcs delivers that without friction.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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