Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap review: Sisphyian tower defense

Poor performance and an egregious progression belie a competent tower defense romp.

Robot Entertainment has been consistently putting out tower-defense action games since the heyday of XBLA. Orcs Must Die is a simple premise, defend a portal from oncoming waves of orcs using traps, gizmos, dohickeys, and your own weaponry. These games see you juggle lanes of enemies into enclosed places, building killboxes of spikes, molten tiles, wall traps, and turrets that will thin out their ranks so that the player’s Warmage can mop up the rest of the stragglers. Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap is a continuation of this idea. However, it seeks to shake up the chaos by supporting up to four players at once and by taking the orcs out of enclosed dungeons and into wider arenas. These changes paired with strange balancing choices, a brutal meta progression, and poor performance all make this spin-off fall severely short of the previous entries in the series, though.

Helpful Heroes

Despite Robot Entertainment’s almost decade-and-a-half-long track record of making satisfying tower defense games, Deathtrap feels frustratingly unrefined, especially compared to previous games in the series. It sees you control one of six playable heroes (with a seventh - noticeably more powerful one - hidden behind collectables in the game’s main hub). There are three melee characters and three ranged characters, and they take up the archetypes you’d expect - two characters with strong and slow attacks, two with fast and weaker, and two in between. These characters feel unique, with their custom kits making the action part of this action-tower defense noticeably different depending on who you play. They work so well because most of these characters’ skills and equipment allow you to engage with Deathtrap’s beloved traps in different ways. One character can lay down bear traps on top of damage over time tiles, allowing her to sneak off into the backlines to pick off weaker enemies, while another can set bombs at choke points, which she can blow up with her blunderbuster when it looks like enemies are about to break through.

Figuring out a map and realising just where you need to put traps down and what entrances you should block off with your limited barricades, so that every single enemy has to walk through the same 1x1 tile choke point, feels like you are breaking the game in the best way. However, this eureka moment eventually becomes clouded by the frustrating malaise that is the game’s structure. Previous Orcs Must Die games had designated campaigns that take you through different dungeons paired with endless horde modes, Deathtrap, on the other hand, is presented as a roguelike. Up to four Archmages have to clear two missions of six waves of Orcs ending in a boss fight. As you beat each boss, you unlock the next run, where an extra mission of six waves is added onto the campaign before you get to the next boss, all while (mostly negative) modifiers are added at the start of each mission. This would seem like the perfect structure to slot the tower defense genre into, but it just doesn’t work in practice.

Orcs walking into a deathtrap.
It's still extremely satisfying to watch orcs wander into byzantine traps.
Source: Lex Luddy

Some of this structure is so frustrating because once you beat a boss, you can’t redo a lower-level run. Finishing runs provide a huge boost in skulls to level up while failing a harder run will lose you a large portion of what you have collected. However, the bigger problem is just how much of a slog it is to actually upgrade your equipment and characters. At a certain point, the game throws so many enemies at you that between not having enough coin to buy more traps or the traps just not going off fast enough, you will be overwhelmed. Logically, both character upgrades and trap upgrades require skull upgrades so you can take on bigger waves. You earn these by clearing missions in a run. The problem is how punitive this upgrade system is. Every time you reduce your spikes’ cooldown time by 0.3 seconds or give your primary weapon a five percent increase in damage, the next upgrade (for your spikes or character) costs more. This resulted in a situation where I upgraded my molten lava title three or four times for the slightest boost in efficiency and the next upgrade I wanted to buy raise its damage done from 22 points a second to 23 was going to cost me 250 skulls - or half of all the skulls I earned in a failed run that could have lasted up to an hour. 

Skullduggery

What’s more, unlike Orcs Must Die! 3 you can’t refund skulls you have invested in an upgrade, meaning you are massively disincentivised from trying new traps because you already made your wall cannons 2 percent faster, so there’s little point in starting from scratch with something else. This punishing upgrade loop extends to Warmages too who both have a shared skill tree and, a much smaller, personal one. The shared skill tree sees each upgrade get noticeably more expensive while the individual ones start out ludicrously expensive. In my twenty-ish hours of play, I never once bought a skill in a character-specific tech tree, because what if I wanted to play as anyone other than Maximillian? And not too long into my play time I stopped upgrading my group skill tree altogether when I realised that my traps can take out more enemies faster anyway.

Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap character upgrade menu.
Most skills are simple stat buffs rather than anything game changing.
Source: Lex Luddy

I can see this upgrade loop stretch out in front of me, beyond the horizon, and it fills me with a deep sense of dread. At some point in each run, you just hit a wall. You won’t clear it, you’ll go back to base to upgrade yourself ever so slightly, and then you will run the same missions again, on the same maps you’ve already figured out the strategies for. For the first 45 minutes of this process, you barely have to touch the controller. 

I hoped some economic meta-progression grind of the game would be alleviated by the game’s much-flaunted multiplayer. Maybe with two players' worth of traps, we could get to later rounds faster. Maybe with extra barricades we could wall off more paths and create more elaborate kill rooms. However, much to my chagrin, when a party member joined me, Deathtrap just halved starting currencies between us in each mission, meaning that we could still only put down the same amount of traps. While there was some enjoyment from guiding my friend through my favourite ways to set up a defense, it often just led to me telling them to put down “a wall here”, “X tile here” or “Y turret here” so that we could get through the early rounds quickly. Then once the actual mission began to get tougher we found ourselves overrun just as suddenly - if not earlier - as the game threw more enemies at us while doling out the same amount of resources. It simply is not balanced well in its current state.

Adding to these woes is Deathtrap’s current performance on consoles. As a comparison, I loaded up Orcs Must Die! 3 on my PS5 while playing Deathtrap and was reminded that that game runs at a near-locked 60fps even in chaotic moments. Deathtrap, on the other hand, running on an Xbox Series X, chugs away at a pretty inconsistent 30fps at the best of times and seems to drop in resolution when things get really busy. For a game that is at its best when you are watching Orcs get chopped down en masse by your deathtraps, it is frustrating that watching your nightmare design in action quickly becomes a blurry mess.

Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap - Traps all set up in a corner choke point
Setting killboxes like these eventually becomes monotonous once you know the best layouts.
Source: Lex Luddy

None of this is helped by the fact that this Xbox port feels like a last-minute addition. Some menus still have PC buttons listed, but the bigger problem is that the menus are all clearly built for a mouse. It’s all cursor-based (and frustratingly slow at that), meaning that if you want to upgrade a trap, you have to move the cursor slowly to the side of the screen to select your trap type, then move it slowly back across the screen to increase its damage by a few percent, then move it back down to the bottom screen slowly again to confirm it… You will be doing this a lot.

Pushing a boulder up a hill

As someone who plays a lot of games, it is very rare to question “Why am I doing this?” “Why am I getting platinum trophies?” “Why am I levelling up every sub-class?” “Why am I prestiging?” We do it because it's fun, or satisfying, or because it will reward us in some way. Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap had me questioning those rewards and that satisfaction in a very fundamental way. I have leveled up characters, beat hidden bosses, and gotten golden gun skins… But to what end though? So I can do it again? So I can move the boulder ever slightly further up the mountain before it slides back down again? For most games, we do it because the answer is, “It's fun.”

Simply put, the act of playing Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap is not fun enough to abate that existential question from rattling around your head while you play.

Contributing Editor

Lex Luddy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has written for Vice, Fanbyte, PLAY Magazine, Gayming Magazine, Push Square, startmenu and more. She can be found on BlueSky @basicallilexi.bsky.social talking about Like A Dragon, Kirby, and queer representation in media.

Pros
  • Interesting hero characters change gameplay
  • It is still really satisfying to watch your deathtrap in action...
Cons
  • That satisfaction dissipates after countless runs on the same level
  • Meta progression is painfully slow
  • Multiplayer is poorly scaled
  • The Xbox port is clearly not ready for prime-time
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