Game Review: Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap

Have you grown up experiencing various versions of Orcs across multiple franchises and thought to yourself, I'd like to endlessly kill those? If so, then boy is this game for you! It's silly, it's fast paced, it's over the top and most importantly even the game doesn't take itself seriously. Just plenty of orcs (and friends) and lots and lots of death for them.

The Rift, defend at all costs!

Death, Death and Death Again!

This game is a bit like a tower defence game, in that the orcs have gateways to enter from, and they want to get to your beloved Rift. You will have a set amount of lives (called Rift Points) for each run through and you have to stop the orcs getting to the rift to take those away from you. The difference being, the orcs aren't on a set path, they will take any way possible to get to the rift so this is where you have to get creative. A run is made up of 6 waves on a level that is called a mission, and then once those 6 waves are completed you'll move on to the next mission with added turmoil for each one you go to. You have a weapon and 3 skills to use yourself, however you also have barricades and traps to make things easier and ever so slightly more chaotic. Each map will have a hidden chest within it where you can gain extra rift points, extra coins for that level or extra skulls which are the currency used outside of the game and for levelling up (more on that later). What you'll want to do is use your barricades to narrow down the routes the orcs can take, and probably take them coming in one direction and through areas where you have laid down beautiful collections of traps ready to murder them for even thinking about getting to your rift.

Select your War Mage

Variety Is The Spice Of Death

Fortunately when it comes to murdering orcs you are given plenty of ways to do so, and it's up to you how you mix them all together to make your personal death walk as fun as it can be for you, and as deadly as possible for the orcs. Your first choice of the game is to decide which war mage you wish to use, these are your characters and there are 8 of them to choose from (6 initially, 2 unlockables) who all come with their own individual weapon and skills. There are both ranged and melee weapons and skills vary from doing big damage, boosting traps and friends all the way through to protecting the rift from taking damage. However your biggest way to plague the orcs is with your traps! You have 38 traps to choose from as the game goes on (39 if you include the mine cart track separate to the mine cart dispenser) which come in a variety of ways to sort them. The easiest one is the placement of traps, which split into ceiling, wall or floor traps but then these are split down even further into acid, ballista, bounce, fire, ice, lightning, organic, physics and poison traps. Every trap has strengths and every trap is more than usable, so find which ones you like and place them everywhere possible along the path of destruction you have created with your barricades. Just be careful, as there are a variety of enemies as well which the orcs have brought along with them, including trolls, gnolls, kobolds and flying creatures, so different traps are strong against different types of enemies.

A flip trap, perfect for launching small orcs

Must Get Stronger!

Each run through you do, no matter how far you get you will be rewarded with skulls from killing orcs and completing missions. These skulls are your key to levelling up your war mage and your traps, in pretty much every way you can think of. War mages can be levelled up to 100, including 6 skills for each individual war mage to add on top of the skill tree that covers everyone. You can get more ammo, more health, more damage, less damage taken, easier overdrive and many more ways to upgrade your war mage to make your next play through even easier. But as we stated earlier, the traps are your main source of pain and fortunately these can also be upgraded! Each trap has 15 upgrades to it, split into 5 levels for 3 different parts of the trap. For example you can have more damage, cheaper price and quicker reset time as the 3 on a trap, so choosing what to spend your skulls on has plenty of ways to make you stronger in your next play through. Should you run out of skulls, just get back out there and kill more orcs!

Skill Tree, gotta level up!

Death is Fun, More Fun Means More Death

The fun part about this game is how enjoyable it is to play over and over again, despite being such a simple idea. For starters you have 11 different levels, each can have a night time or a raining variety which add new enemies each wave as well as a couple of the bigger levels having multiple layouts to mix things up as well. Play throughs will struggle to be the same due to the amount of change that can happen in one run, each time you move on to your next mission, you have to pick a distortion which stacks each time you move forward making it harder and harder each round. You also have a choice of a thread, which is a mini boost for your character or traps which you will pick after each wave, things such as your ability now has an extra charge, or your trap now does double damage but costs more to place etc. This means it's pretty difficult to play the exact same run twice, and you have to adapt to what you've got from these as the game goes on. One thing that will never stop being fun though, is watching the floppy animation of the orcs when they do get launched through the air. Even such a simple thing as going for cartoon graphics on the game add to the level of fun, as everything is kept towards the aim of making the game fun and silly.

These distortions affect every map, better choose wisely

Is Deathtrap A Win or No?

For me, this game is great, it's full of silliness and has enough about it to make you think about what you're doing. If you want to keep it nice and simple, leave it on the base difficulty and just enjoy playing, want more of a challenge? There is 10 difficulty levels you can choose from, making the enemies a lot harder to kill from the very beginning. The only slight downside to it is the limited voice lines for the characters and the enemies, so be prepared to hear the same few lines over and over. However that doesn't take away from how much fun the overall gameplay is and how everything fits into the build of just have fun. So yes, Deathtrap is a win and hasn't got any less fun after many attempts at the game and it's able to cover the need for a challenge should you want it as well, very well executed game and highly recommended.

8/10

Written by Lee Watson