Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap review: Sisphyian tower defense

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As a dedicated gamer, I’ve been hooked on Robot Entertainment’s tower-defense action games ever since they were popular on XBLA. One of their most intriguing creations is Orcs Must Die, where you defend a portal from orc invasions using various traps, gadgets, and weapons. The gameplay involves channeling waves of orcs into confined spaces, setting up lethal killzones filled with spikes, molten tiles, wall traps, and turrets that whittle down their numbers so I can finish off the remaining ones as my Warmage. Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap is an extension of this concept, but it aims to add a new twist by accommodating up to four players simultaneously and by moving the orc battles from enclosed dungeons into larger arenas. Unfortunately, these changes, combined with some questionable balance decisions, a punishing progression system, poor performance, and a lackluster presentation, make Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap disappointingly miss the mark compared to its predecessors in the series.

Although Robot Entertainment has been creating engaging tower defense games for nearly a decade and a half, Deathtrap seems rough around the edges, particularly when compared to earlier titles in the series. In this game, you can choose from six main characters, with a more powerful seventh character hidden within collectibles in the game’s central hub. The characters are divided into melee and ranged types, each fitting typical archetypes: two slow but strong attackers, two quick but weaker ones, and two balanced. The unique abilities of these characters make the gameplay experience in Deathtrap’s action-tower defense blend differ significantly depending on who you select. This diversity is achieved by designing each character’s skills and equipment to interact uniquely with Deathtrap’s popular traps. For instance, one character can place beartraps on top of damage-over-time tiles, enabling her to slip into the backlines to pick off weaker enemies, while another can set bombs at strategic points, which she can detonate with her blunderbuster when it appears enemies are about to break through.

Discovering an effective strategy for a map, setting up traps and blocking off entrances strategically so that enemies funnel through a narrow passage, gives the feeling of bending the game to your will in the most satisfying way. However, this moment of triumph is often dampened by the game’s problematic structure. Previous Orcs Must Die games offered designated campaigns that progressed through various dungeons along with endless horde modes. In contrast, Deathtrap presents itself as a roguelike game, where up to four Archmages must complete two missions of six waves of Orcs, culminating in a boss fight. Upon defeating each boss, the next run begins, adding an additional mission of six waves onto the campaign before reaching the next boss. Moreover, negative modifiers are added at the start of each mission, creating a structure that seems ideal for the tower defense genre but falls short in practice.

In this game, it’s disheartening that after defeating a boss, you can’t reattempt lower-level runs for better progress. Completing runs grants a significant increase in skulls for leveling up, while failing at higher difficulties results in losing a substantial portion of your collected skulls. The main issue, however, is the grind involved in upgrading equipment and characters. As the game intensifies with waves of enemies, you may find yourself short on coins to buy additional traps or traps that don’t activate quickly enough, leading to being overrun. Both character and trap upgrades require skulls for improvement, which are earned by completing missions in a run. The problem lies in the harshness of this upgrade system. Each time you decrease your spikes’ cooldown time slightly or enhance your primary weapon’s damage by a small percentage, the next upgrade (either for spikes or characters) becomes more expensive. This creates a situation where I upgraded my Molten Lava title three to four times for minimal efficiency gains, and the next upgrade I wanted to buy, which would increase its damage from 22 points per second to 23, was going to cost me 250 skulls – equivalent to half of all the skulls earned in a failed run that could take up to an hour.

To add on, unlike Orcs Must Die! 3, once you’ve invested skulls in an upgrade for your wall cannons or Warmages, you can’t refund them. This discourages experimentation with new traps because you might have already made your cannons slightly faster and there’s little incentive to start over with something different. The same issue arises with the Warmages as they share a skill tree and have their own individual one, both of which become increasingly expensive over time. In my approximately 20 hours of gameplay, I never purchased a skill from the character-specific tech tree since I wasn’t sure if I would want to play as anyone other than Maximillian. Additionally, I ceased upgrading the group skill tree fairly early on when I realized that my traps could kill more enemies faster without the upgrades.

As I gaze ahead, the cycle of upgrades seems to unfold endlessly, extending past the skyline, and it instills in me a profound feeling of unease. At some stage during each playthrough, there’s an insurmountable barrier that you simply can’t overcome. Instead, you retreat to your base to make minor enhancements, then repeat the same missions on familiar maps, where you’ve mastered the tactics. For about 45 minutes of this repetition, you hardly need to interact with the controller at all.

In simpler terms, I had anticipated that the multiplayer aspect of the game would help reduce some economic progression grinding in the game, particularly by allowing two players to set up traps and barricades faster for advancement. However, to my disappointment, when a player joined me, Deathtrap split our starting currencies in each mission, which meant we could still only place the same number of traps. Although it was fun showing my friend how to set up defenses, I often found myself instructing them on where to build walls, specific tiles, or certain turrets so that we could breeze through the early rounds quickly. As the difficulty increased, we were overwhelmed just as quickly, if not sooner, due to the game throwing more enemies at us without an increase in resources. In its current state, it seems the balance is off.

To make matters worse, Deathtrap’s performance on consoles is less than ideal. In contrast, I booted up Orcs Must Die! 3 on my PS5 while playing Deathtrap and was struck by the fact that it maintains a nearly seamless 60fps, even during hectic scenes. Sadly, Deathtrap struggles to keep pace on an Xbox Series X, frequently stuttering at an inconsistent 30fps and lowering resolution in busy situations. This is particularly vexing because the game shines when you’re witnessing Orcs being decimated by your traps, but the action becomes a blurry mess as the frame rate dips.

As a devoted gamer, I can’t help but feel let down by the hasty feeling of this Xbox port. Menus still show remnants of PC controls, but that’s not the main issue. The real problem lies in the fact that these menus were clearly designed for a mouse, making them cursor-based and painstakingly slow. If you wish to enhance a trap, for instance, you must move the cursor laboriously to one side of the screen to choose your trap type, then return it slowly back across the screen to bump up its damage by a small percentage, followed by another slow journey down to the bottom screen to confirm… You’ll be doing this quite frequently.

For individuals who frequently engage in gaming, pondering questions like “What’s the point?” or “Why am I striving for platinum trophies?” or “Why do I keep leveling up each sub-class?” or “Why do I prestige?” often seems unusual, as we usually find enjoyment, fulfillment, or some sort of reward in these activities. However, Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap made me question the value and satisfaction derived from those rewards in a profound manner. I’ve advanced characters, vanquished concealed bosses, and obtained gold gun skins… yet, what is the purpose? To repeat the process all over again? To push the boulder slightly higher up the mountain before it rolls back down? Most games we play because the answer is simply, “It’s enjoyable.

To put it another way, the experience of playing Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap doesn’t quite manage to distract you from the nagging philosophical doubts that linger in your mind as you engage with the game.

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2025-01-27 15:28