Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap Preview: A true evolution for the orc-slaying series

In the coming days, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 will debut and make its arrival in full. This hugely anticipated game is all about slaying hordes of alien monsters as a powerful hero, and you might be wondering what any of this has to do with Orcs Must Die!? Well, for anyone who has never played a game in this long-running series before, Orcs Must Die! is a very similar premise where a group of players (or a solo player) has to fight off hordes of orcs using various traps and other buildable alternatives to protect a core objective. It's essentially Space Marine without the grim gore.

While Orcs Must Die! has been around for quite a while now, in 2025 we're set to get a new instalment that also serves as a proper update to the format. It will be built on Unreal Engine 5 and has been rebalanced in such a way that it is cooperatively-focussed, with online co-op now fully supported, and a whole new slate of powerful heroes to master and use as well. At the core it's still very much Orcs Must Die! but this coming game also feels like a 2.0, a true evolution and step forward and reason for players to jump in and fall in love with this fun and light combat oriented title. So, with all this fluffing out of the way, let's get down to business and delve into our time with Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap.

For starters, I only had a short period of time with the game, but that was enough time to sit down and play for around 20 minutes. I took on the role of the crossbow-wielding War Mage and had the chance to use its hitscan targeting to chew through the hordes of orcs coming my way, while my colleague Rafa took to the frontline with his warhammer and a couple of Robot Entertainment developers added to the equation and protected our flanks. The actual shooting, movement and combat felt incredibly fluid and responsive, almost as though I was playing an actual refined hero shooter, so there was never any issue with gunning down the orc masses and picking off stragglers that the traps couldn't dispatch.

Speaking about traps and the construction suite, the main change here from past Orcs Must Die! games is that barricades no longer cost resources to build. That has a few ramifications. For starters, each player only has a set number of barricades they can place, meaning strategic placement becomes more important in order to make the most out of the utility. You'll still want to use them to block lanes and paths that the orcs want to use, but now you can only block a few paths as you simply will not have the barricades required to do much else. This also means that you have more resources to spend on traps, and this is important to do as traps are the most effective ways to eliminate orcs. There are a ton of options here, with some designed to deal damage and others to slow orcs down, for example, and the main thing to note is that you can place these on the floor, on walls, on ceilings, almost anywhere, and you can keep putting them down assuming you have the resources to spend to purchase them. So, combining traps with barricades, you can even design fantastic kill zones where orcs will essentially have no chance at survival as they continue on their predetermined route towards the objective you are defending.

Sounds easy enough, right? To keep things interesting, Robot Entertainment has come up with a few spanners that it will throw into the works. Whether it's orc types that will be able to ignore and travel over barricades, additional spawn doors that completely avoid your trap and barricade placement, tough boss-like foes that require the team to come together to take them down. You're constantly having to adapt and adjust to overcome the challenge at hand, which only becomes more and more demanding as bigger and bigger hordes of orcs begin pouring in.

While Deathtrap is playable alone, it's clear that the game excels when played cooperatively. Being able to combine the talents of the different War Mages and work as a collaborative unit to create a strategic trap placement plan, this is when the game is at its best. I will add that there is further sauce to address but due to the rapid and short nature of this preview, I didn't get much of a taste of these systems. So, while you can expect a more impactful economy system, progression for the various characters, and even ways to spice each level up with what are effectively challenge cards, the majority of what I experienced was tailored around what I feel matters the most: slaying orcs. Lots of orcs.

And if this is the metric that you value most for an Orcs Must Die! game then I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that Deathtrap succeeds. This game feels fulfilling and fun, and thanks to the impact of UE5, it looks absolutely stunning and plays like a charm. I'm looking forward to 2025 rolling around so I can test and experience the game in a larger and freer manner.