Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap Review - Hell is Repetition
“They’re coming right for us.”
As the orcish hordes make their approach, a lone soldier stands ready to repel them. This War Mage has been trained specifically to cut down every orc, goblin, gnoll and any other creature that would seek to aid them. Always pushing forward, the horde will not stop their march to take control of the magical rifts.
How is one lone warrior to repel the horde?
In martial arts, it is well known that an effective response to an enemy attack is to utilise their own momentum and use it against them, to redirect their attack in a way that creates an advantage for the defender. Thus, with a strategic placement of barricades, a single War Mage can direct the horde on a path of their choosing, a path lined with all manner of deadly traps that, with little physical effort from themselves, allows a War Mage to rack up a body count that would make even Nathan Drake blush.
Orcs Must Die: Deathtrap is the latest in the long-running tower-defence series, but not a sequel in the proper sense. A spin-off that uses Distortions and Threads to introduce rogue-like elements in an attempt to mix up the formula and provide different challenges to players. When starting a game, you are given the option of three levels to choose from, each with its own distortion effect challenge, such as no automatic healing between waves, certain enemy types are guaranteed to appear, etc. As you survive each wave of orcs and associated creatures, you get to pick a thread that will provide bonuses going forward, such as traps being cheaper or having a greater chance of critical hits. On top of the regular distortions, variations in the maps add extra enemies into the mix that do not behave like your regular enemies. There is a very bare-bones narrative about taking on four orc leaders who are all vying for total control of the Horde following the events of the last game, providing a basic premise for the game, but in reality, the focus is on the gameplay loop.
At its core, Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap follows the same formula as previous entries. To protect the rift from the attacking hordes, you make use of barricades to funnel the majority of the enemy forces into your personally constructed kill zones, earning the runes needed to purchase even more traps to deal with slaughter the increasing number of enemies each wave throws at you. The maps come in three different sizes, each providing the horde multiple pathways to the rift and plenty of opportunities to corral them into your preferred instruments of death.
Most of the time, you will be able to utilise your barricades in conjunction with the geometry of the map to guide the horde to your preferred kill zone, but there are a few instances where you will have to get creative with your barricade and trap placement. However, once you have figured out a strategy that works for you, there is little reason to vary it at all. The horde’s starting points are all static and follow the same pattern as they introduce an increasing number of orcs to each wave. It would give players a greater challenge if there were more potential orc entry points, forcing the player to contend with different potential pathways and trap setups. This would fit the rogue-like aesthetic by forcing the player to adapt their strategy to what works best on any given run.
This leads me to the replayability factor, which is where the game really struggles. The base difficulty level can present a challenge to newer players, as they learn the most efficient way to place their barricades and traps. After this, the only challenge is increasing the difficulty, which, while rewarding more of the skulls that make up the currency used for almost every upgrade, consists of ever-increasing health pools for your enemies. To deal with this, you need to use your skulls to upgrade your traps. With no real increase in challenge, except for every enemy soaking up damage like a sponge, there is no real drive for the player to commit to the grind.
If you are looking for something that will make your brain work harder than a first-person shooter, but not as hard as trying to juggle a soccer ball as you ascend through the different levels of Hell, the puzzle aspect of designing your maze of death machines in Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap can be intellectually stimulating. However, once the initial mental challenge is overcome, there is no incentive to experiment and change the way you play. Fans of the series will enjoy testing themselves against the orc hordes on the new maps, along with the added rogue-like elements, but between the lack of a real narrative to keep players engaged and difficulty increases that only equate to increased health for enemies, it is not likely to be as fondly remembered as some of its predecessors.
Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap was reviewed on PS5 using a code kindly provided by the publisher.
