Orcs Must Die: Deathtrap review

pcgamer.com:

What is it? A co-op roguelite tower defense/third-person shooter hybrid.
Release date: January 28, 2025
Developer: Robot Entertainment
Publisher: Robot Entertainment
Reviewed on: Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, Intel Core i7-12700F, 16GB RAM
Steam Deck: Playable
Multiplayer?: Yes
Link: Official site

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That mantra could apply to horde shooters in general—demonstrating through games like Helldivers 2 and Deep Rock Galactic that mowing down thousands of something will always be cool—as easily as it could apply to Orcs Must Die, a series which spent the last decade content to reprise its novel blend of tower defense and third person shooting with steely consistency. Trends come and go, industries shift and change, but orcs? Orcs must die, and that’s just not the sort of thing you mess with.

Until now, anyway. The series has seen an overhaul in Deathtrap as it reaches for that holy grail of infinite roguelike replayability. In past entries, Orcs Must Die had static level layouts; over the course of the game, you’d master an expanding toolset of traps and weapons as the game’s raving hordes escalated in quality, quantity, and complexity. If you lost a level, you replayed it until you got it right, and eventually could set up such an efficient factory line of firepower that no amount of orcs could successfully pile through.

In fact, those most potent of tower defense setups—affectionately called killboxes by the community—are as fun as they are obstructive to replayability. For a horde shooter, Orcs Must Die has always been a bit too easy to solve, reach a point where nothing can touch you, and dispense with any challenge. Deathtrap’s sweeping changes feel angled to prevent that issue by ensuring any and all plans can go wrong; a sea change that sometimes leads to an exhilarating sense of panic, and sometimes leaves the game feeling at odds with itself.

The meat and potatoes are unchanged; you’ll load into a mission with a loadout of