Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap

Conclusion: It still is a good game for a few fun hours. I recommend it (only when massive discount!) bc I love the series. It's bright and funny, but lacks a clear vision on what it wants to be, especially with the half-baked rogue-like system. In the OMD franchise, I'd say it's the most loveless and soulless of all games, many mechanics aren't fully thought out and content like upgrades, skill-tree etc feels like meaningless fillers. There's no way to customize neither your character nor your traps. It's not worth the full price. I certainly won't spend as much time on it as on the other parts in the series. [hr][/hr] [b]Maps[/b] This iteration features only a small amount of static maps and gets repetitive quickly. Most maps are too big, full of fluff and most parts don't matter. Once you learned the most efficient way to funnel monsters down on one path, that's it. Some enemies can also spawn in random locations accross the map, which is toxic in a game based on funneling enemies into your killbox when they can just spawn past it near your rift, especially on later rounds when you can't kill them easily. Not thought out mechanic which becomes a theme. [b]Playable characters[/b] You can tell they somewhat tried to give every playable character a personality, but it doesn't work, at least for me, at all, especially since there's virtually no character development aside from some skull-sink fillers to max out their stats (same as with traps sadly). You can change some colors of the outfit and put some out-of-place-accessories like sunglasses or a swimming ring, but other than that no customization at all. [b]Traps[/b] This one was the most disappointing for me. The game doesn't include every trap from the previous games and some changed mechanics like the Swinging Mace and Ceiling Laser are now trigger-based. But really the worst thing is that you can't customize traps like you could in literally every OMD before. You can sink some skulls into every trap to give it max power, and then that's it. No weighing between speed and damage, no additional effects like burning, nothing. In change you get the rogue-like mechanic which grants you temporary upgrades for every run. [b]Rogue-like mechanic[/b] I liked the run based gameplay-loop more than I anticipated. Instead of having an endless mode, which I missed dearly, you can play an endless amount of maps one by one, with increasing difficulty and modifiers (beneficial as well as harmful). It fits well with OMD gameplay because you get more of the interesting parts like planning, setting up barricades, creating a killbox, fixing weakpoints of your setup etc... and less of the boring part like waiting. The extra modifiers also give you unique powers and challenges so every run is slightly different. In practice I found that the upgrades you get are mostly very boring and just fillers. There are only very few upgrades that actually change the way you play the game and you can't get them reliably in a run (for example auto ballista targeting and dealing 2x damage to fliers is one of the few game-changers). Also no real synergy between upgrades so it kind of feels meaningless what you pick. Most of your strength still comes from your original setup. One-time upgrades like Go-All-In (Your next placed traps cost all of your coins but gets every stat dmg, speed and duration doubled) that could potentially be really good and strategy-defining, but can be picked one time only which is useless in a run of many like 30+ maps. Because WHEN are you gonna pick it? Not thought out at all. Also you CAN switch your traps on every map, but the upgrades you get are for your current trap-setup only. So sad that they didn't fully flesh out the game mechanics. [b]Enemy variety[/b] It feels like this game features almost every enemy from the previous parts and more, which feels overwhelming in your first rounds. There's buffers, debuffers, silencers, rooters, several types of warmage-hunters and fliers, all from the get-go. The enemy system feels rushed, there's no progression, it all just gets thrown in there without you having the special tools or strategies to deal with either of them (you can't customize traps anymore to prioritize certain monsters). [b]Performance[/b] It runs stable for me, but is poorly optimized and especially some dual-rift maps cause massive fps drops for me.