reggaehonour's Full Review: Trapt for PlayStation 2
Trapt fails to raise the overall level of Deception to PS2 standards. Aside from minor AI tweaks and Dark Illusions, the experience is largely the same, minus the fun of Deception 3.
For those who have never played Deceptions 1-3, here is a quick explanation of why it is a worthwhile series: your character plays a young girl trapped in a few nearby castles (locations change as you are pursued). Gameplay alternates between resource management, consisting of developing traps and choosing nine to take with you, and a harrowing 3D chase through a castle where you stave your pursuers off with combinations of psuedomedieval ceiling, wall, and floor traps. The best part of this game is being able to set off three painful traps (one of each location type) on the same pursuer in a short amount of time, and across variable distances, depending on how far you want to infuriate/fling/drag/knock them.
I had a great time playing the Deception series on PS1. While the very first one had some serious play flaws, including a limited amount of times one could set traps off, Deception 2 made great strides in originality, gameplay, music, and flavor. And Deception 3... it was an addictive masterpiece. Featuring a trapbuilder's licensing system (pass challenges to be able to build better traps), 100(!) puzzles, and a fairly good story mode with a good heaping of endings and special traps, D3 kept me entranced for hours. The addition of a side leap made dancing around real-time 3D traps a lot more fun, and the trap ring system allowed fast-charge traps, triggered traps, high-damage traps, and delayed traps. The environment was varied and deep enough that each trap ring made a critical difference, and added to the replay and game variation.
With all these fond memories of the series in mind, I shelled out $49.99 for a sealed copy of Trapt.
I was only mildly happy with the beginning sequences. Same badly translated, vague storyline. Hot evil queen. Traditional dopey, aloof king. Familiar assassination attempt. Familiar framing attempt. Hysterical/grunty Japanese voice acting. Eh, I thought. The gameplay has to be super-charged. 20-hit combos! New 3-tier currency system! Fancy new moves! Insanely insidious new traps!
Boy, was I wrong, to a large extent.
Graphics were more detailed, and enemy characters had a few quirky animations, smoothly animated. Blood puddles, at last, adhered to stairs instead of sticking straight out, and the death animations were tragic or comic. Some truly large traps revealed themselves after some time, especially in the Clock Room. Even in the first room, a hulking 50-foot-high music box sat temptingly, waiting to somehow be activated many trap discoveries later. Sadly, few of the traps had the mythic Greco-Roman look to them as favored in D1-3, being redesigned with a Silent Hill 3-like annoying vagueness. The game also had a disappointing habit of doing overblurred close-ups of the action, disorienting the player and stripping away detail from the otherwise acceptable action.
Gameplay seemed as if it had been handled by an entirely different programming team from last time. Gone was the fun of trap licenses and puzzles, to be lamely replaced by a series of side quests with Goreyesque dialogue that seemed to have little to do besides affect future side quests. At one point I faced a would-be smuggler and was asked a password. Oh, the fun! Trap combos were dull and creatively devoid, and took the importance out of status-affecting traps like vases, oils, and gases (two of which were not even in the game this time). I was mad when I spent a good amount of Trapt currency on a Rolling Bomb, a trap from D3 that let you get a bomb's-eye view and steer as you chased a hapless victim toward a gunpowder box. Could I see from the bomb's point of view? No. I had to listen for the bomb, which rolled like the unsteerable dud it was, roll somewhere off the screen past an enemy character. Gee, thanks. I was also sour that various gas traps were gone, replaced by a lamer version of the Mega Yo-Yo. Also sorely missed was a leg chain that gave you free rein on snagging and dragging your victim near combo-riffic traps just waiting to fire. Deception 3 reached the pinnacle of player control: the game was made responsive and deep enough to solve a marvelously varied series of room-tailored challenges in Puzzle and License modes. How far, then, has Trapt fallen.
Trap building was also slowed by the necessity to buy new rooms to play in. Why not open these rooms through other means and save trap funds for trap development? By the time I had bought the last extra room, I had already solved the game twice.
Enemy AI is just cagey enough to drag things out. You won't be able to get angry enemies sprung easily; often it is as if they are counting pixels in their quest to avoid traps. Just hurry up already...
Enemy abilities are tried and true, with the new lightning whip and jumping stab enough to make you think twice about getting close, but apparently complainers have e-mailed Tecmo about the Axe Knights, hulking trap-resistant monsters from D3 who could sweep across the largest rooms in a single terrifying, high-damage swing of the axe. Now you can just lure them around like any other character, so there isn't much standout value any more. One character is largely another.
Sounds were sparse but realistic. I would have liked to hear more character noises, some kind of way to show there weren't just automatons chasing me around.
**SPOILER** Dark Illusions are the one redeeming part of this game. Design the right traps, or activate the right sequences, and you can launch an enemy into a horrific mega-trap. I have just discovered four of the eight Illusions, but my favorite is the very first, a music box that shoots out a leg chain, drags an enemy (or you, if you're clumsy) into colossal gears, grinds the enemy upward through the music box, blood spattering the glass, until the haunting melody ends and the enemy is limply spit out of the high hole, to crash 20 feet below for one final, insult-to-injury splat. The Clock Tower fatality is fearful and gruesome. Reminiscent of a trap from Saw, a pillar rises sixty feet into the air with the victim, leaving him or her stranded with no choice but to fall... until the giant clock in the room winds up, shoots a spear-headed telescoping metal rod square through the character's chest, yanks him or her back to the clock face with a cringe-inducing slam, and sets the shocked, dying victim up with a pinch from the clock's huge hands before a sixty-foot fall. As a final macabre touch, doors above the clock face open, sending out a flock of skeletal birds. There is a lot of cartoon violence out there that requires an M rating, but Trapt is morbid and vicious to the point that it would probably warp young children. Despite all its gameplay downsizes, the game's Dark Illusions take violence to a level in video games not seen anywhere but movies like Se7en and Saw.
So what is new in Trapt? So far, and I am at 95% of all traps made, and three replays through, just the Dark Illusions and some minor upgrades. Because there is nothing else a Deception veteran could consider revolutionary, you'll be kicking yourself for buying a game that has gotten rid of side puzzles, licenses, and complex in-game mechanics, watered down some classic traps, eliminated a fun dodge move, neutered its Axe Knights and other powerful characters, introduced another watch-and-nod storyline, and reduced the number of endings. **SPOILER** Two of the endings are completely lame. One truncates the game halfway through the levels without giving you a trap, which shows real stinginess on the new game designers' behalf. In any other recent Deception (2 or 3), no matter which path you chose, you would end the game with a neat little extra trap. Here, it's almost as if the designers are irritated with you exploring the "story"'s possibilities.
Trapt is Deception in the flesh, if not the spirit. If the essence of the series is going to be bottled in beautiful but flawed vessels like this, there's no sense in making a Trapt 2.
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