After three mainline releases, the Orcs Must Die! franchise has opted to move away from its traditional stage-based approach to action/tower-defence gameplay and into the roguelike realm. Building upon the legacy of its predecessors, Deathtrap feels warmly familiar but structured in a novel way that is likely to attract a new audience. With 4-player coop available, a meta-progression system that will take some time to progress through and plenty of opportunities to try out new traps and War Mages—Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap certainly has a lot of longevity. However, without any sizable leap forward in design and with some unfortunate flaws, the game experience feels somewhat humdrum.

I would describe Deathtrap as story light—an experience much more interested in its gameplay offering than any sought of tangible and engaging narrative. Despite this, the game (and the series as a whole) does manage to infuse a lot of character and personality into its audio and visual design. This is a game that has you taking on the role of 1 of 6 available War Mages, tasked with defending the rift from a horde of dastardly orcs. The cartoon graphics and ragdoll physics combine to create charm and endear you to the game’s characters, even if a narrative is next to non-existent.

Your job is to fight back against the outlandish orc onslaught by laying traps and barricades during a building phase and then jumping into the fray as the next wave is released. It’s a concept that will feel very familiar to Orcs Must Die! fans, but where Deathtrap differs is in its roguelike design. Now, instead of levels that can be cleared to differing degrees of success, you instead fight back the orcs in stages on a run, culminating in a final boss fight. Each stage gets progressively more difficult with your rift’s hitpoints carrying over from one stage to the next. A currency is earned as you play which you can gamble forward by moving onto the next stage, and potentially lose if your rift’s hitpoints drop to zero.

Whilst difficulty scaling in Deathtrap is definitely of concern, it doesn’t necessarily take away from the moment-to-moment fun that the series is known for. The combination of setting up your barricades and traps in clever and satisfying ways and then joining in the battle yourself through third-person combat is really strong. A mechanical change to Deathtrap also places your barricades as their own resource rather than costing the same currency as your traps. This means each new map starts with a fun game of “How do I best set up my barricades to funnel these bastards into a kill zone?”. Barricade placement is key, and it’s what pivots Orcs Must Die! away from mindless action and towards engaging strategy. The way Deathtrap frames these barricades shows a great understanding of how important they are within the overall design. A great choice.

The traps and orcs available will be largely familiar to franchise veterans with some new additions to spice things up. Generally speaking, you’ll have your damage-dealing traps such as spikes that shoot out of the ground or ballistas that fire from a range. There are also displacement traps such as flippers that can launch orcs away or traps that can help support your strategy such as tar pits that slow enemies who walk over them. The levels themselves are nicely designed with a more open approach than previous Orcs Must Die! titles allowing for further strategy, especially in coop. However, on launch, it does feel as though there aren’t enough levels to keep the game fresh. After a few runs, you’ll have already seen most if not all of the levels and you’ll have likely already discovered a strategy for how to approach it. Random modifiers that can impact the stages don’t do enough to truly change things up and your approach will usually stay the same.

Deathtrap also features a meta-progression system where after each run you can spend your hard-earned currency on new traps, upgrades to your owned traps, passive upgrades for all War Mages, and War Mage-specific upgrades as well. This system feels… fine. It does appropriately reward players and helps them to develop specific strategies that rely on the traps they’ve unlocked or upgraded. However, it does also feed into some of the game’s overall design flaws. The challenge of the later levels, for instance, is definitely exacerbated at earlier stages of the meta-progression, making it feel like quite a grind-fest. This inevitably means you have to do multiple runs if you want to defeat all 4 of the game’s bosses, which simply further highlights the game’s lack of stages. Because you’re often encouraged to leave a run early so that you don’t lose all your accrued resources if you die, it also means you play the early stages of the game more than the later ones. And due to the aforementioned ease of these early levels, it really does start to feel like a waste of time as you play on auto-pilot to simply get through to the actual challenge. The stages can also just feel very long, especially if you’ve played well and funnelled the orcs all around the map with barricades. It just gets a bit repetitive and slow.

I can’t help but feel as though the game would have benefitted greatly from having more stages, quicker levels, more tangible progression from one stage to the next, and perhaps even an overall narrative progression or a more final end-game goal. As it stands, Deathtrap is a fairly uninspired roguelike, carried by its fun gameplay and visual style. With quite a good number of games now released in the series, I would have hoped Deathtrap to be something better than what came before it. But instead, it feels like a sidegrade. Still thrilling with its excellent moment-to-moment gameplay offering and overall idea, but falling short of what could have been. Regardless, when you funnel those orcs into an ultimate death chamber and watch as your various traps disintegrate those fools and fling them around like ragdolls, you quickly remind yourself of the serious fun this series can offer.