Deathtrap Review

Early Access is a difficult area to review. Do you review the game as it stands, or by what the developers predict it will become? Do you criticise the glitches or accept that the game is not completed and give them a pass? How do you measure the ambition of the developers and their promises for what the game will eventually be, and how much should you trust them?

Deathtrap is an unusual hybrid of the tower defence genre as well as a top-down RPG, such as Diablo or Torchlight. It’s an interesting concept that deserved to be explored, but Deathtrap unfortunately fumbles at nearly every hurdle.  It’s Orcs Must Die without the charm, Diablo without the exploration and Defence Grid without the creative trap placement. It is a lot of things, but none of them, at least at this stage, are achieved.

It’s a shame that an interesting idea could stumble so dramatically, with such obvious and glaring mistakes smeared over more subtle problems and even glimmers of good ideas. Despite its touted ‘strong action-RPG elements’ there is little exploration here, which is one of the staples of the genre. Each level is a system of corridors for the enemy to march along as they desperately and uniformly shuffle towards the end portal for reasons, with a few empty areas for you to spend one minute examining before returning to the tower defence game. This begins to feel even more constrictive when the end of each level draws you back to the menu, rather than naturally allowing you to reach the next stronghold.

This might have been alright if the game was more focused on the tower defence aspect, but this too feels weak and underdeveloped. In Deathtrap you won’t be able to disrupt the hordes from their marching path, and instead you’ll only be able to build traps in very limited areas with little choice on what you actually get to build.

During the first level you have no option but to build exactly what is prescribed in each zone. After a few levels, gameplay options will expand giving you some choice, but you never truly fill in control of what to do. Different traps must be built on different bases, so you can only build the sentry turrets on the mechanic bases found along the enemies path. You’ll be allowed to upgrade the traps between levels, and you’ll have to balance them all as you won’t be able to choose what you put where. Tower Defence games should be about creativity and thinking outside of the box to overcome apparently impossible odds; Deathtrap rejects that and forces players to conform to extremely similar options each and every time.

Your characters interaction with the enemies feels just about the same. As a mage you’ll get a handful of spells that feel the same as each other, while a warrior and hunter have the same mediocre level of variation for their powers and abilities.

Hopefully these can be improved, as well as the mediocre graphics that seem underdeveloped and unpolished, with voice acting that sounds like they hired the most bored people in the word to read the few dialogue lines.

There are some glitches, the occasion white flash that covers the scene or the game just dropping out to the desktop altogether, though these seem easily fixable. What might be more of a struggle is the awkward and frustrating controls. Having left click as both movement and attack is not uncommon, but the response is sluggish and clunky, which is extremely annoying. Sometimes when trying to retreat from an overwhelming force you’ll just stand still and attack some more, while other times when you’re trying to attack you’ll wind up running half way across the level.