Remember Cookie Clicker, the game that made idle games famous? Orc Incremental comes from the publisher that brought Cookie Clicker to Steam and made Clicker Heroes, and this time you are not playing the hero. You get an orc army, the humans get invaded, and honestly? Being the bad guys feels great.
Short answer: play it. The demo is free on Steam, the loop is incredibly addictive, and the rough edges are not the kind that should stop you.
How Orc Incremental plays
Push as far as you can, ascend, buy upgrades, run again. If you have played any idle game, you already know this loop.
The card draws are where it gets interesting. Your army depends on what you pull: five orcs and three shamans one run, eight orcs and zero shamans the next. Draws cost gold. So no, you cannot sit around waiting for the dream setup - early on you adapt to whatever the cards give you.
Gold stops being a problem later, and that is when the real optimization starts. Cards have tiers, common up to legendary, plus random bonus skills rolled on top. Want a perfect army? Prepare to spend a pile of gold and hope for good pulls (prestige upgrades at least raise your odds of rare ones). Min-maxers will be very happy here.
And then there are totems. Up to five of them, and they are no joke - the right totem can carry your entire progression.
Two builds that broke the demo for us
Raging orcs. Rage speeds up an orc’s attacks when its HP drops low, which sounds mild until you stack it: an upgrade for extra speed during rage, a totem that triggers rage on every kill, life leech for melee units. Now the rage never ends, because every kill resets it, and the orc heals with every hit. Five of those in the front line, witch doctors buffing from behind - the screen is empty in seconds.
Shamans turned out even stronger. Upgrade their attack range and how many times chain lightning bounces, add a totem that throws in an extra lightning every fifth attack, and four or five high-tier shamans delete waves before anything gets close. Range is the whole point here. A boss can one-shot a raging orc; nothing ever touches the shamans.
That is two of the early units. There are also witch doctors, catapults, and dragons we did not get around to breaking yet. Somebody will.
Screenshots
The annoying parts
You one-shot the entire screen and then… you wait. The transition animation between waves takes long, and after a rebirth, clearing the early stages again turns into a real chore - it took us quite a while to one-shot our way back past stage 140. Other idle games handle this with instant clears or a 10x speed toggle. This one needs that, badly.
The army layout screen, too. Crowded, sprites covering each other, and good luck clicking the exact low-tier unit you want to swap out. With enough power points you can field a small horde, so this only gets worse over time.
Smaller gripe: the prestige tree has about 20 upgrades, half of them infinite, and eventually you end up mindlessly dumping points into the same one or two lines. Fine for a demo. The developer has confirmed more bosses, upgrades, and mechanics are on the way, so we expect the tree to grow.
How much demo do you get?
A hundred stages, beatable in under two hours with two or three rebirths. You can push past stage 100, but nothing new shows up there. There are also trials - challenge runs without your prestige upgrades, each with its own gimmick. Drunken Master makes your soldiers sometimes hit their own while fireballs fly wherever they want. A nightmare on paper. Possibly great.
We wanted the demo to last longer. That says more good than bad.
Should you play Orc Incremental?
Yes, if idle games are your thing - the roguelike card spin makes this one stand out, and the demo costs nothing. The full version lands later this year, and if the wave animations and the army screen get fixed by then, this could genuinely live up to the Cookie Clicker and Clicker Heroes legacy it comes from. So far, it is on the right path.
