The Orcs Must Die! series and the tower-defense game genre in general seem to me to be related to factory games like Factorio and Satisfactory. While Orcs Must Die! is about feeding hordes of cartoon monsters into machinery to make… mulched cartoon creatures, those games concentrate on feeding raw materials like iron and coal into intricate machines to produce spacecraft parts efficiently. Making that goop is a lot of fun right now, but perhaps we will learn how to use it to construct spaceships in the future.
The action-tower defense gameplay of Deathtrap, the fifth OMD game (if you include the now-defunct Unchained), is restructured. Instead of a linear sequence of levels to complete one at a time, we are put through a roguelike-style gauntlet of randomly chosen stages, each with various modifiers that can occasionally make you and the orcs more powerful. The game concludes with a boss fight. Burning through those can be a lot of fun, especially with up to three pals in the new cooperative cap of four. However, like many run-based games, it eventually becomes a bit too repetitive and gritty (not the sort where you are grinding up orcs) for its good.
I say that in part because, despite playing Deathtrap for over 60 hours in both single-player and cooperative modes, I have only encountered three of the game’s four bosses and vanquished two of them. This is one of the few instances where it becomes evident that it is intended to take a very long time to check all the boxes, and that I have already seen the vast majority of what is here, even though it is generally Gamexta policy to finish a game’s content before writing a review (and if we don’t, we will tell you and explain why).
I have played all six characters, unlocked every trap, and seen all but most likely the last boss and his map throughout many runs. Additionally, I have not yet seen a possible cutscene for the ending story, but since Deathtrap is even less narratively heavy than Orcs Must Die!, I believe I can safely wrap up this review without using up the remaining skill tree and paying 99,999 skulls (also known as in-game money) to unlock the character skin set that is on display.
A skeleton warrior friend is called forth by Sophie, a cat with curved swords and tossing stars. That is your first option, of course.
Selecting a character and starting your first run is as simple as choosing Sophie, an anthropomorphic cat with curved swords and throwing stars who calls forth a skeleton warrior companion and sets bear traps. Sophie is an obvious choice. Unless you are playing cooperatively and someone else reaches her before you do, that is your first choice for a third-person action game like this. An old-school OMD archetype like Vaan, who carries a crossbow (which is essentially a machine gun) and can momentarily stop the rift you are defending from suffering any damage from orcs, would be a reasonable choice in that situation.
I cycled through all of them, including tanky bear-man Kalos, Riftkin sniper Mac, and Harlow, the blunderbuss lady with a pet dragon, before deciding that Wren the mage was my favorite. She summons floating proximity mines, recharges traps for faster kills, summons two clones of herself to attack in triplicate, and her rifle-like wand has an active reload minigame for bonuses. Though there is not much of a plot other than “kill the orcs” for them to act out, the cast as a whole is powerful, and their personalities shine through in their many humorous fighting cries.
You are then given a choice of three levels to complete, but there is a catch that makes it more difficult and, in my opinion, almost always overrides my preference for one map over another: each map is randomly assigned a modifier that can be anything from a 25% increase in orc damage to a certain type of special enemy that is guaranteed to appear every time, or perhaps you will always see an unstable rift appear that needs to be destroyed quickly before it spews out more enemies. These modifiers are more significant because they impact not only that one map but all subsequent ones in this run, and the more difficult ones have the power to frighten me.
The one that cuts headshot damage by 50% is not what I want if I am playing as a sniper because I love zoomed-in headshots! – Additionally, you have to make a group call that ruins your entire co-op experience.
The hard modifications can make me feel afraid.
This is not to imply that the map selection is unimportant. Generally speaking, they are rather enormous—larger than the series’ norm but not as large as Orcs Must Die! Having played all of the War Scenarios in 3 at least a dozen times, I have developed a preference for those where I can control the orcs’ paths and a distaste for those that are more open-ended and nearly impossible to fully control unless you have benefited from specific upgrades.
I will choose one where I know I can push incoming waves into a narrow path of movement-slowing tar traps, surrounded by walls with threshing machines and lasers, acid, or poison pelting down from above while auto-targeting turrets eliminate obnoxious flying enemies before they can get past my barricades, provided the randomized modifier price is not too high. Those seem like surefire victories.
A shared pool would have been a far better option for barricades.
You do not lose everything if you do not draw barricades because some of those other thread cards might be strong. Among many other things, they might provide your default attacks significant ammo capacity increases, damage from burn, freeze, or shock, or additional uses of special abilities. For instance, by default, Wren can have four proximity mines out at once, but I have increased it to seven. For some reason, one card causes you to shoot extra-large projectiles; they are simply larger; they do not do more damage.
However, none that I have seen can compare to the effect of having more barricades. If you are on a team of three or four, even the Cursed card, which gives you ten more blocks but makes all of your traps cost ten times as much, can be worth it because their traps are unaffected.
Since you can only carry a few traps with you (especially in cooperative mode) for each level, you must carefully study the map layout to determine where to place the best combinations of floor, wall, and ceiling traps to deal damage and rack up scoring combos with multiple types of damage on single targets (which charge up your most powerful abilities). This is another important aspect of the puzzle. There are a few dozen of these, but the great majority are classics like the flippers that send enemies into the water, the arrow walls straight out of Indiana Jones, the saw traps, the freeze traps, the acid traps, the poison traps, the flippers that set enemies on fire, and so on. I will be curious to see how the imaginative types out there mix all of them. A few new ones complete the armory, such as a massive ice turret and a harpoon that grabs adversaries to draw them in.
Overall, there is a good balance of adversaries that keeps things fresh for a long time.
Additionally, a lot of the enemy variety is repeated from Orcs Must Die! While the third adds scores of trolls, ogres, elementals, flying people, and hunters who hunt Warmages despite barricades and traps, it also adds about a dozen new sorts to the mix. An orc hung on a balloon appears to be functionally similar to the other bats but takes a few more hits. The Stonebat, for instance, may be very annoying if you do not remove them and can frighten you with a projectile that takes you out of the action for a few seconds.
Additionally, there are shielded ogres, troll archers, a large floating cyclops that sails over traps and then blasts you with a damage-hose laser beam from his eye if you stand between him and the rift, a lizardman thief who tracks you down and takes your coins, and a drummer who does not attack but boosts other orcs. Overall, it is a good combination that keeps things fresh for a long time.
You can choose to cash out after each map with the money you have earned so far, or you can bet half of it on whether you can beat the next map before enough orcs reach your rift, which has a permanent “health.” It is a clever mechanic because, in some cases, you will barely win with one or two rift points left and have to decide whether to continue or go home and level up. I much rather do this than feel like I had to finish every level of earlier OMD games without an orc ever getting past my defenses to truly feel like I would defeated it.
Verdict
Orcs Have to Perish! A roguelike version of the action-tower defense series, Deathtrap does a good job. The skills of the new Warmages and the combined effect of its randomized modifications may shake things up nicely for quite a few runs, even though the majority of its traps and the never-ending procession of very killable foes are brought over from previous games. It is as much fun here as it is throughout the rest of the series to figure out how to lead the orcs to their destruction and then join in on the gory mayhem.
After a few dozen hours of joyfully gnawing up and spitting out orcs in both solo and cooperative play, I did lose interest in the game because of the slow meta progression and the progressively longer missions, the first of which are too easy and the latter of which become frustrating due to bullet-sponge enemies.