Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap Review

ign.com:

It occurs to me that the Orcs Must Die! series – and the tower-defense genre as a whole – are something like a cousin to factory games like Satisfactory and Factorio. Those games focus on feeding raw resources like iron and coal into complex machines to efficiently produce spaceship parts, while Orcs Must Die! is about feeding hordes of cartoon monsters into machines that produce… mulched cartoon monsters. Maybe one day we'll learn to build spaceships out of that goop, but for now just creating it is plenty of fun on its own.

Deathtrap, the fifth OMD game (if you count the now-defunct Unchained), shifts its reliable action-tower defense gameplay into a new structure: rather than a linear series of levels to figure out one at a time, we're put through a roguelite-style gauntlet of randomly selected stages, each with a mix of modifiers that can make both you and the orcs more powerful in sometimes interesting ways, capped off by a boss fight. Burning through those can be a blast, especially with up to three friends in the new co-op cap of four, but like a lot of run-based games it does eventually get a little too grindy (and not the kind where you're grinding up orcs) and repetitious for its own good.

I say that in part because after more than 60 hours playing Deathtrap in both co-op and single-player, I've only seen three of its four bosses and defeated two. While it's generally IGN's policy to complete a game's content before writing a review (and if we don't, we'll tell you and explain why), this is one of the rare cases where it's become clear that it's meant to take a very long time to check all the boxes, and also that I've already seen the great majority of what's here. Over the course of dozens of runs I've unlocked every trap, played all six characters, and seen all but probably the final boss and his map. I've also not yet seen a potential ending story cutscene, but considering Deathtrap is even lighter on storytelling than Orcs Must Die! has traditionally