I haven’t played a tower defence game in almost a decade, but it’s amazing how quick my Orcs Must Die! reflexes come back to me when there’s a horde of greenskinned monsters running for my rift.
You would be forgiven for not remembering Orcs Must Die!. It came out back in 2011 and got significant praise for the way it blended third-person action with tower defence strategy—a game where you spend your time hurling down traps and battering every orc you could see. The goal, for those uninitiated, is to protect your fancy rift from orcs. If more than a handful of orcs jump into the rift, you fail. So, you set up traps and chokepoints and get ready to stab, shoot, burn and blast orcs in every direction to protect it and live to fight another wave. In practice, this often involved you in trenches of your own making, dodging your own sawblades and arrow traps to take the fight to the horde. Orcs Must Die! Wasn’t the only game in the action/tower defence niche, but it was the best of them.
A sequel followed back in 2012, and then the world moved on, enough so that despite enjoying both games, I wasn’t even aware of 2021’s Orcs Must Die! 3. Like that one friend from university texting you out of the blue or the Black Eyed Peas jump scaring you on the radio, I wasn’t expecting this 2010s throwback.
Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap’s biggest addition is the jump from two player co-op to four. I played with a full complement, and found that just a couple of extra players can pivot the whole game into chaos. While you’ll start fighting just a stream of orcs, by the end of the match several different gates around the map will bring forth a flood of mean greens. You’ll need every trick to keep them away from the rift.
Luckily, each of the individual war mages that make up Deathtrap’s cast has a little something up their sleeve. I played a giant panda looking guy that could put down a healing tree—although only one, which I wasted by placing it on a lane I didn’t end up fighting on—and leap into combat with a superhero movie-esque smash that delivered huge damage (or just let me leap over a wave to harass it from the rear). The abilities felt meaningful, but they don’t completely change things up.
Every wave you survive gives each player a chance to select a new perk that will augment your arsenal, providing powerful buffs from a random pool that should help each run feel different. Each orc that falls also gives you a chunk of change that you can use to slap down more traps. While I started my run fighting in a lush, vegetation filled courtyard, I ended up speccing heavily into laser traps and finished my match fighting deep in the building behind. I’d turned the space into a shrine to all things lasery and painful, the ceiling lined up with lasers and traps to slow and redirect orcs—ensuring they had to spend as much time in my recreation of the laser scene in the original Resident Evil movie. You know the one.
There’s a sort of frantic energy here that makes me excited to see what else Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap might have under the hood. There’s plenty of personality here, but Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap isn’t aiming to give me one run, but 200. Considering I went into the appointment expecting a fun nostalgia hit and little else, I came away feeling excited at how modern that formula still feels, with a freshness to the chaos that drew me in within seconds of sitting at the keyboard.
If Deathtrap can recapture those old fans and draw in a new crop of players when it launches early next year, developers Robot Entertainment could have something very special indeed.
