Assassin’s Creed publishers Ubisoft are making another round of layoffs as part of wider efforts to persuade their investors to stop yelling at them. They’re letting 185 people go across their European operations, and will be closing UK-based Ubisoft Leamington, whose recent projects include supporting development of Star Wars Outlaws and Skull And Bones. All this less than two months after jettisoning the hundreds of people who worked on free-to-play shooter XDefiant.
Pokémon TCG Pocket is warning players of the consequences for cheating, just ahead of the expected release of in-game trading later this week.
In an announcement pushed to the app yesterday, players were warned about violations of the Terms of Service that specifically relate to cheating:
“We are aware that some players have engaged in data tampering, real money trading, and other behaviors that violate the Terms of Use,” reads the in-game notice. “If we confirm that a player has engaged in behavior that violates the Terms of Use, we will warn them, suspend their account, or take other action.”
No further details were offered as to what behaviors, specifically, are being targeted. Players on r/PTCGP have been speculating that this warning is related to a few different behaviors. One of these, referred to as Wonder Pick Farming, is a practice where individuals mass-create new accounts to take advantage of the many free packs available for new players, and try to roll a “god pack,” or a super rare pack of cards with five very rare cards. Then, they offer their friend code to others for money, so that buyers can add them as friends and then see the “god pack” in the game’s Wonder Pick function and be guaranteed a very rare card.
Another behavior speculated to be the target of a crackdown is a practice where players will grind accounts to level 50 with plenty of banked currency by participating in PvP battles over and over, using the game’s timeout function to stall games until the opponent concedes so they can win repeatedly.
Beyond that, it’s possible that the warning was simply published because of the game’s upcoming trading feature release, which could potentially kickstart a new wave of inappropriate behavior, especially where “real money trading” is concerned. The trading feature, which was panned by fans upon announcement, allows players to trade cards of one star rarity and below with friends. Players have expressed frustration with both the rarity limit on trading, as well as the need to spend some sort of currency to make the trade happen in the first place.
The feature is planned to go live later this week on January 29, alongside the new expansion Space-Time Smackdown.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Today I learned about balut, a street food of the Philippines. It’s a fertilized duck egg, boiled or steamed, in which you can still see the duck embryo as you munch. I’m too old to discover this acquired taste on a gap year, but I’m not too old to waltz down the horror aisle in Itch.io, throwing retro jumpscarers into my basket. Which is where first-person Filipino suspense game Hapunan can be found. You play a young street food vendor hawking the eggs on a quiet corner late at night. Naturally, something alarming is afoot. There is talk on the radio of dangerous folk out at night…
The Marvel Rivals community was sent into a frenzy last week after the rumor spread that developer NetEase Games may be planting misleading information in the game’s code to catch leakers — even if there’s little evidence to suggest such a thing is actually happening.
Video games sometimes leave behind traces of in-development content as developers work tirelessly to publish updates for the public. Sleuths known as dataminers spend their time sifting through code to uncover these traces and often report them back to excited fans, with one Marvel Rivals example including references to the Fantastic Four being discovered before their official confirmation earlier this month. It started with inclusions like Blade and Ultron and quickly ballooned to the point that there are now around 20 names rumored to join the hero shooter’s roster of playable characters. As the list has grown, players have let the excitement carry them from patch to patch while they wait to see what NetEase has up its sleeve. That anticipation turned into confusion and suspicion last week.
So a bunch of the Rivals leaks are fake lol pic.twitter.com/hzlVvkkx1C
— Worm (@Saulman11835779) January 23, 2025
Alarm bells rang when Marvel Rivals Leaks Discord user and content creator KeoneSpirit shared a post suggesting that NetEase is using a few elaborate tricks to throw dataminers for a loop. In their now-viral post, they accuse the developer of setting up “fake characters to catch leakers” both in the code and “potentially” with other sources, too. With so many Marvel heroes rumored to be included post-launch, fans have now found themselves questioning if any of the leaks they’ve seen are real or “plants” part of a larger scheme. Keone attempted to clarify by sharing a lineup of characters they had “been told” were “very likely fake.”
The list includes:
If accurate, it would mean many hopeful X-Men inclusions and comic book deep cuts were simply rumors or maybe even planted in the code to mislead would-be leakers. Keone’s post could result in months of speculation coming to an end as thousands of excited fans regroup — or it could mean nothing at all. While Keone’s comments spread like wildfire, a few dataminers from the self-taught group at X0XLeak say they aren’t so sure NetEase is intentionally working to throw fans off its scent. They believe there’s enough evidence to suggest that the aforementioned list of heroes isn’t off the table.
“Could they be intended troll by NetEase? I guess,” X0X member and dataminer VISCERAL told IGN. “Would it make sense, in my opinion? No. The way I see it, they could have made it way easier if their goal was to troll us.”
In light of the news surrounding potential hero plants, VISCERAL published a lengthy X/Twitter thread to provide evidence that some rumored characters can be found in Marvel Rivals’ code. It’s a series of examples lined with proof that many of the characters mentioned in Keone’s Discord post are included with more than just their names but ability tables, too, and as you might have guessed, finding this information wasn’t simple.
X0X’s matfacio told IGN that, if NetEase had truly tucked away bait to trick leakers in this way, it would need to know exactly how dataminers are rummaging through the Marvel Rivals backend, explaining: “I think it would require reverse engineering a reverse engineer.”
The existence of new, hidden hero names in Marvel Rivals doesn’t totally poor cold water on the idea that the developers are attempting to mislead, but some believe the studio would have to go through a lot of trouble — likely more trouble than it’s worth — just to keep the more dedicated fans on their toes.
This is not a 100% confirmations that they are all coming or when they will come.
This is just to show off that these actually exist. 🧵All Hero tags can be found in: Marvel/Content/Marvel/Data/DataTable/MarvelHeroTable
Ability Tables are to long to fit the screenshot, will… https://t.co/9uMZsQ8xK5 pic.twitter.com/g7oCnkunha
— VISCERAL (@zvis_ceral) January 23, 2025
While rumors of NetEase’s tampering haven’t been squashed among fans, X0X has several other theories that might hold more weight. There is always the chance, for example, that NetEase didn’t actually intend to ship an update with mentions of an army of unannounced playable heroes, and that they may still be added to the game eventually. VISCERAL and matfacio also aren’t ruling out that a few heroes may have been left on the cutting room floor after a major, pre-launch development shift, such as NetEase’s rumored switch from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.
“I have a new theory that every hero discovered was most likely in a ready to go state when the game was reportedly still on UE4,” matfacio adds, “then they switched to UE5 and took their time to fix several performance issues between presumably porting over characters they already made.”
X0X isn’t convinced that NetEase is toying with Marvel Rivals fans, but if the developers aren’t leading everyone on, then how did this start? Although the trail leads back to Keone’s post, fears of tampering also stem from Marvel Rivals Leaks Discord admin and popular Marvel Rivals X user @Rivals_Leaks. When new leaks were discovered suspiciously grouped together in the code earlier this month, one of their sources claimed they had no knowledge of the characters in question being included. With a reliable source’s information not matching up with dataminers’ findings, a theory was born: what if NetEase is planting fake heroes?
“I had gained info from a reliable inside source that they had once again not heard of any of these characters before they were leaked, leading to the possible theory that they were all plants along with some possible evidence,” Rivals_Leaks explained, “so I had decided to warn the Discord server about the possibility of plants and I had Keone make an announcement, which was a bit poorly worded and several people around the internet took it the wrong way.”
The post shown in that screenshot has been taken down. There is a very low chance that most of the characters are bait just for the amount of work that would have to go into faking them. For some characters there are voice line events between characters and gameplay tags related…
— Marvel Rivals – Leaks & Information (@RivalsInfo) January 23, 2025
Keone said their post spread before edits could be made, creating a snowball effect that saw many members of the Marvel Rivals community latching onto a message that was founded on a “misinterpretation.” While Keone and Rivals_Leaks had their suspicions regarding NetEase’s potential involvement in recent leaks, neither of them intended to start the chain reaction that resulted in large portions of the community accepting their theory as fact. This latest Marvel Rivals drama sent so many leak-obsessed players back to square one, but its origin boils down to one thing: a miscommunication.
“The primary assumption from the main leakers (separate from me, the ones who have most info) now is that the ‘plants’ are in fact still real. And the developers did not intend for us to find them,” Keone says. “That’s why I edited the original post and since deleted it, and have worked to help clear up confusion surrounding it.”
If you’re reading this piece to find out if Colossus or Professor X are going to be added to Marvel Rivals, I’m sorry to say there’s still no answer for that, and there probably won’t be one for a while. So far, NetEase has only confirmed The Thing and Human Torch as the next new heroes to join the fight. When they release in the coming weeks, they’ll team up with the already-released Mister Fantastic and Invisible Woman, who launched as part of Season 1 earlier this month. Season 2, which is (still) rumored to include Blade, is expected to launch sometime this April, with more updates and skins set to drop in the meantime.
NetEase has set high expectations by promising to release at least one new playable superhero every half-season, but with or without leaks, we won’t really know who’s coming until NetEase is ready to talk. At the very least, the Marvel universe is packed with memorable superpowered characters, so as long as Marvel Rivals continues to find success, there’s a good chance you’ll see your favorite face show up at some point down the line.
Even if every rumored and datamined character really is in development at NetEase, the team could scrap any of the aforementioned names for any reason at any time. Regardless of how certain you might be about the validity of a leak for any game, it might be a good idea to take some of what you hear online with a grain of salt. Keone, at least, wishes they had been a bit more cautious before sharing their findings and theories.
“A server that started small to spread information has now become a cornerstone of information across the entire community, and sometimes we can misinterpret things or make mistakes,” Keone added. “We’re a group of people working hard to find and share information, and there’s never malice behind what we post. We’ll work hard to make sure things don’t spread like wildfire again unless it’s been verified first, and are grateful for everything we’ve been able to share thus far.”
IGN has asked NetEase for comment.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP.
Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
I reckon you’re likely to be in one of two camps with precision platformer Bauhaus Bonk – which I instantly appreciate for giving me an excuse to use the word “bopping” – either finding it so easy you wonder what the point is, or getting genuinely sucked in by its deceptive trickiness. It’s a single-button affair, having you navigate levels by alternating a pivot-point on a shape I don’t know the name of so I’m just going to call a spinny stick.
There are moving background elements in some stages – in others, you make your own pace. Except I can’t really make my own pace, can I Bauhaus Bonk? Because the swing soundtrack makes me feel like a plodding buffoon if I’m not responding with appropriate gusto. This is entrapment, game. I am devilishly compelled by swing, like a Reefer Madness extra.
Violent vermin.
After releasing the first Tails of Iron in 2021, developer Odd Bug Studio seemingly hasn’t taken a moment to rest, returning to its bleak world of anthropomorphic rats, frogs, and bats with a sequel that looks to offer fans a slightly expanded experience in Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter. And while it’s certainly an incredibly well-realised fantasy world with stunning visuals, atmospheric sound design, and thoughtful combat, it’s unfortunately also held back from greatness by lacklustre level design and excessive backtracking.
Presenting what may well be a good entry point to the world of Tails of Iron if you happened to miss out on the original, Whiskers of Winter shifts the perspective over to an entirely new protagonist called Arlo, an heir to the Warden of the Wastes who must travel to multiple biomes on a quest to defeat the malicious Dark Wings clan.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
When I visited Ubisoft Quebec last year to see Assassin’s Creed Shadows for the first time, I was encouraged by the development team’s enthusiasm for stealth. While I’ve enjoyed Assassin’s Creed’s foray into RPG territory, after hundreds of action-heavy hours I think it’s about time the series rediscovered its sneakier genes. Not by way of Mirage’s “back to basics” approach, but by reaching forward to provide some much-needed evolution in the series’ stealth design. Shadows’ promise of a Splinter Cell-style lighting system had me excited, but after playing a three-hour demo build, I’m not quite convinced that it’s delivering a meaningful change for Assassin’s Creed.
The demo’s quest chain, set in Harima Province, had me infiltrating a variety of strongholds, from small gardens with just a couple of guards to towering castles packed with opponents. If you’ve played an Assassin’s Creed before, the fundamental approach to all this is practically unchanged; you’ll be scaling to highpoints to identify guard placements, using simple distraction techniques to create opportunities, and stabbing a lot of people in the neck with a hidden blade. All of this can be achieved using the same techniques you’ve relied upon for years, and many of the flaws that have previously hampered such techniques also make a return. For example, the hidden blade can once again be foiled by high-level opponents, neutering planning and positioning in favour of skill points and upgrades. Incredibly sticky environments continue to be the norm, which ensures you never fall from a rooftop or slip during an ascent, but being glued to surfaces often proves catastrophic when it comes to quickly reacting to enemy threats. Emergency escapes feel like you’re fighting against a magnetic leash that really wants to lock you in a bad place.
If you’ve read IGN’s recent hands-on preview you’ll know that our writer, Alessandro, really enjoyed Shadows’ revamped take on stealth. While I feel differently, having left Ubisoft’s playtest room somewhat disappointed, it’s important to note that Shadows is fulfilling its promise of taking stealth seriously. One of its two playable characters is Naoe, a ninja wholly dedicated to stealth. Aside from the prologue in which I had to play as combat-focused Yasuke for tutorial purposes, I was able to play as Naoe for the entire duration of the demo. While Shadows often asks if you’d like to switch roles, it had no issue with me choosing Naoe every single time.
Standing notably shorter than her heavily armoured companion, Naoe is able to avoid enemy sightlines more easily. Her slender frame allows her to do things the bulkier Yasuke can not, such as slip through narrow gaps and hide in boxes, while her grappling hook opens up access to rooftops and ledges that have no climbing handholds. Playing as Naoe opens up new routes and pathways through Shadows’ world… or perhaps, more accurately, playing as Yasuke closes the door on many established Assassin’s Creed traditions. He’s unable to perform any of the series’ staple stealth actions, aside from using his bow for silent ranged attacks.
Those stealth staples become more interesting (at least on paper) thanks to refreshed ideas. Shadows’ title partly refers to its new approach to detection. Staying in the dark renders you invisible to enemies, and the closer you move towards a light source the more visible you become. This is clearly spelled out by a meter on your HUD that fills and empties as you move around. The clever bit, though, is that you can manipulate the environment to create advantages. Lanterns can be destroyed with blades or thrown shurikens, plunging rooms into darkness so that you may draw blood completely unseen. It’s an idea that was prevalent in the era of Thief and Splinter Cell, but has fallen by the wayside since stealth largely became an optional approach in action games rather than its own dedicated genre.
The adoption of this approach sounds like a complete game changer, but in reality it had minimal impact on a playstyle I’ve honed across 13 prior games. I don’t doubt that, under the hood, the engine’s enemy AI routines are influenced by this new simulation. But when it comes to actually playing Shadows, I found the presence of light rarely impacted my progress or forced me to devise smarter methods of approach. I could stand on rooftops with a full visibility meter and no one would see me. Traditional sightlines seemed to be the only factor I truly had to consider.
This sense of same-but-different persists across many of Shadows’ ideas. Naoe is able to lie prone and crawl on her stomach, which certainly did make a difference when it came to invisible repositioning. But the environment I encountered in the demo made little creative use of this ability. For example, I was disappointed to discover that a tunnel beneath a house didn’t have a hatchway into the room above. Instead of acting as an alternative entry point, all this crawlspace offered was the same pathway that could be faster accomplished by simply scaling across the rooftop.
A more positive shift can be found in the positioning of enemies, with encounters offering an increased challenge over Mirage’s overly-simple arrangements. I was caught out more than a couple of times by overlapping vision cones and patrols, and the resulting high alert state does seem to make guards more persistent in their hunt for you than in previous games. Simply hiding on a roof and tracking foes using eagle vision did seem enough to easily avoid them, though, at least on the default difficulty.
Because of the better guard placements, there is an increased and welcome emphasis on assessment and planning. Gone is the drone-like bird of the last few games, replaced with an over-the-shoulder zoom, meaning scouting and marking enemies can only be done from your own sightline. It’s a good change, one that forces you to explore an area on foot and spend more time considering your angles of approach. But when it comes to executing a plan, things return to the very familiar.
Naoe’s toolbelt holds kunai throwing knives for insta-kill headshots and smoke bombs for concealing attacks and escapes, both of which are necessary but vanilla stealth tools. The same can be said for repositioning guards, which is done either by luring them to your position with a whistle, or baiting them to a specific spot with a thrown bell. There’s the obvious combos, such as encouraging a guard towards an explosive barrel that you then detonate with a throwing knife. But beyond that, at least in this demo, there didn’t seem to be the canvas for anything more experimental or exciting.
Shadows seems reliant on a lean and familiar set of abilities, at least as far as stealth goes. Even options that initially seem to be fresh are repackaged tools from the past; you can call on an allied brawler to charge at a designated target, which works as both a distraction and a method of remotely eliminating enemies, but this is really just a thematically different take on the berserk darts that have appeared in a number of prior Assassin’s Creed games.
Naoe does have a detailed skill tree, allowing you to build and hone her abilities beyond those standard tools. But all the exciting options are combat focussed, such as the elaborate nine-strike Guard Breaker, or Eviscerate with its kick-flip finisher. When it comes to stealth, the most exotic option I could find was the ability to slow down time for a few seconds. As far as this demo was willing to show me, there’s nothing along the lines of traps, disguises, or other more advanced stealth ideas. Perhaps the changing of the seasons, which I didn’t get to experience and is promised to change the landscape considerably, is where Shadows’ more interesting stealth challenges lie.
Instead, the toughest challenges I faced were direct clashes. Shadows effectively has two combat systems; Yasuke’s feels like a direct continuation of Valhalla, but tuned up to feel significantly swifter and a little more tactical. I liked it a lot, at least as far as I could tell in the limited time I played as him. Naoe, meanwhile, is nowhere near as strong as her samurai counterpart and so takes considerably more damage and cannot block as effectively. This forces her fight style to prioritise dodging and staying nimble. I really like the concept that drives this – that each character provides a distinctly different version of the same experience – but on the battlefield I found myself frustrated. Playing as Naoe, it feels like the rhythm of combat runs at a different tempo to the attack animations, and so I constantly tripped up over awkwardly-timed dodge and parry windows.
In most instances, the brutal punishment inflicted by combat forced me to take stealth seriously. Its classic carrot vs stick stuff, and an effective stick at that. What I’m less enthusiastic about is my pure stealth playthrough being derailed by mandatory bosses with huge health bars. I wish, when playing as Naoe, these bosses were reconfigured as stealth-focused assassination challenges in the mould of Assassin’s Creed Unity’s centrepiece missions. Instead I’m forced to defeat my foe in a one-on-one duel that’s clearly designed to fulfill the samurai fantasy side of Shadows’ offering. I appreciate that Shadows always gives you the option to switch to Yasuke (and prior to one of these fights even prompted me to), but to choose a stealth character and then be forced to engage in direct combat does feel like being told your decision is invalid. Maybe, with several more hours of practice and a combat tune-up prior to release, duelling with Naoe will feel less like a punishment.
After three hours of play, I’m fairly confident in saying that Assassin’s Creed Shadows will be the best stealth experience of the series’ RPG era. Having a character and toolkit entirely dedicated to the approach signifies that Ubisoft is taking this fundamental part of the franchise seriously for what feels like the first time in many years. But, as dedicated fans will know, stealth never actually went away – it was just eclipsed by the action. Shadows lets that stealth step back into the limelight. However, just because stealth now has prominence doesn’t mean it’s undergone any meaningful change. For all the studio’s talk of Splinter Cell-like detection systems, Shadows feels like Assassin’s Creed getting back to business as usual rather than exploring a new, sneakier frontier. For many exhausted by the reign of Spartans and Vikings, that will likely be enough. But if what I’ve played is representative of Shadows as a whole, I think Ubisoft has missed a huge opportunity to capitalise on the advanced stealth potential of one of history’s most recognisable clandestine assassin groups.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
Amid Microsoft’s multiplatform video game push, all sorts of Xbox games are rumored to be set for the PlayStation 5 and the recently announced Nintendo Switch 2. But could Bethesda’s Starfield be among them?
In an interview with IGN’s former Director of Video Content Strategy, Destin Legarie, for his new Patreon-funded show Save State Plus, Microsoft’s gaming boss Phil Spencer was asked directly whether he could confirm that Starfield was staying Xbox exclusive for the time being.
Phil Spencer on Starfield exclusivity
Destin: “Can you solidify that Starfield is staying put for the time being?”
Spencer: “No.”
Source: https://t.co/ccNXLG6GU5 pic.twitter.com/r6sfx9e193
— Destin (@DestinLegarie) January 25, 2025
“No,” was Spencer’s response.
“There’s no specific game… this kind of goes back to my red line answer. There’s no reason for me to put a ring fence around any game and say this game will not go to a place where it would find players, where it would have business success for us. What we find is we’re able to drive a better business that allows us to invest in great game lineup, like you saw. And that’s our strategy. Our strategy is to allow our games to be available, Game Pass is an important component of playing the games on our platform. But to keep games off of other platforms, that’s not a path for us. It doesn’t work for us. What we’re doing now, we think really enables us to build the best platform for the world’s best games.
“The world’s biggest games are available in multiple places. And more and more creators are asking us, ‘how do we stay connected when our game might be playable in all these different places?’ And we want Xbox to be absolutely the platform that enables that.
“We think that makes us unique. Most of the other platforms out there are single platform on single device. Whether that’s PC, whether that’s mobile, whether it’s a console. And we want Xbox to be a platform that enables creators across any screen that people want to play on.”
Starfield and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle were both reported as being considered for PS5 as far back as March 2024. Indy ended up confirmed for PS5 with a spring 2025 release window, a few months after its release on PC and Xbox Series X and S. But Starfield is yet to be confirmed for PS5, although Spencer’s comments here certainly suggest it’s on the cards.
A number of Xbox games are currently available on PS5, including Rare’s Sea of Thieves, Tango Gameworks’ Hi-fi Rush, and Obsidian’s Grounded and Pentiment. Microsoft already publishes Minecraft games on PlayStation consoles, among many other platforms, and is set to publish Doom: The Dark Ages and Ninja Gaiden 4 on PS5 later this year. There are even reports that Microsoft is finally ready to release Halo on PlayStation after decades of Xbox exclusivity.
Meanwhile, Spencer has teased Microsoft’s plan to release Xbox games on Nintendo Switch 2, reinforcing recent reports that indicate the company is set to back the next-gen console in a big way.
Spencer has said Xbox’s multiplatform push is in part about bringing in more money to Microsoft’s gaming business — with the pressure now on to deliver following its eye-watering $69 billion acquisition of Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard.
“We run a business,” Spencer said in August last year. “It’s definitely true inside of Microsoft the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery we have to give back to the company. Because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing and what we’re able to go do.
“So I look at this, how can we make our games as strong as possible? Our platform continues to grow, on console, on PC, and on cloud. It’s just going to be a strategy that works for us.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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 been, I think I can safely tie a bow on this review without grinding out the rest of the skill tree and unlocking the character skin set that’s on display for 99,999 skulls (AKA in-game money).
Setting out on your first run is as easy as picking a character and diving in, which is a no-brainer because one of the options is Sophie, an anthropomorphic cat with curved swords and throwing stars who summons a skeleton warrior buddy and lays bear traps. Of course that’s your first choice for a third-person action game like this, unless you’re playing co-op and someone else gets to her first. In that case it’s understandable that you’d fall back on an old-school OMD archetype like Vaan, who wields a crossbow (that’s actually a machine gun for all intents and purposes) and can temporarily prevent the rift you’re protecting from taking any damage from orcs. After cycling through them all, including tanky bear-man Kalos, Riftkin sniper Mac, and Harlow, the blunderbuss lady with a pet dragon, I settled on Wren the mage as my favorite: her rifle-like wand includes an active reload minigame for bonuses, she summons floating proximity mines, recharges traps for quicker kills, and conjures two clones of herself to attack in triplicate. It’s a strong cast as a whole, though, and while there’s not much by way of a plot beyond “kill the orcs” for them to act out, they all have distinct personalities that come through in their various jokey combat shouts.
Immediately thereafter you’re presented with a choice of three levels to tackle, but this comes with a catch that complicates it and – for me – almost always overrides my preference for one map over another: each is randomly assigned a modifier that ranges from increasing orc damage by 25% to a specific special enemy type being guaranteed to show up every time, or maybe you’ll always see an unstable rift appear that must be quickly destroyed before it spews out even more enemies. These modifiers carry extra weight because they don’t just affect that one map, but all of the rest going forward on this run, and the tough ones can put a fear in me. If I’m playing as a sniper, I definitely do not want the one that reduces headshot damage by 50% (because zoomed-in headshots are my whole thing!) – and when you’re playing in co-op you have to make a group call that screws you all over the least.
That’s not to say the choice of map isn’t important. They’re mostly fairly large – bigger than what’s been standard for the series, but smaller than Orcs Must Die! 3’s War Scenarios – and after playing each one what feels like a dozen times or more, I’ve definitely developed favorites for those where I know how to control the orcs’ paths and eye-rolling dislikes for those that are more wide open and almost impossible to fully wrangle unless you’ve lucked into certain upgrades. As long as the randomized modifier price isn’t too high I’ll go for one where I know I can force incoming waves into a narrow path of movement-slowing tar traps lined by threshing machines on the walls and lasers, acid, or poison raining down from above, all while auto-targeting turrets knock down annoying flying enemies before they can slip by my barricades. Those feel like guaranteed wins.
It’s worth noting that while Deathtrap’s orcs and maps look very much like the previous OMD games because of its cartoony art style, the lighting is notably improved, and that’s something that’s on full display when the nighttime and rain modifiers are in effect. Those aren’t just for looks and come with randomly spawning skeleton orcs and water elementals, respectively, that can spring into existence behind your barricade lines. That’s a good way to keep us on our toes when we’re feeling like we’ve got things locked down – you’ve always got to keep an eye on the minimap when you hear the telltale sound effects and warning calls.
If I must, though, I’ll choose a stage like the Dry Docks map: a shipyard where the rift can be in one of several locations and there are more paths to each of them than the default number of barricades can block off. The opening phase of any Orcs Must Die! map, and the unlimited-length pauses between waves, are spent figuring out the puzzle of how to control the coming flow of enemies. They will usually approach from four different doors that gradually open up, and the idea is to send them on the longest routes that overlap as much as possible, creating killzones where your traps will provide the most bang for your buck. Efficiently obstructing paths is tricky, but the ghostly previews showing where orcs are able to run based on the options available to them help to spot and plug holes. There are almost never enough barricades to go around, so you’ll often have to make the best of a bad situation and decide what holes you’re going to have to fill with your own magical bullets.
“Why not simply buy more barricades?” OMD veterans may ask. Well, Deathtrap revamps the way barricades are handled in a fairly radical way: rather than being a trap item you can buy for increasing amounts of cash, your team gets a set number that can be placed for free (and are replaced between waves if they’re destroyed). Overall I like this change because it’s an acknowledgement of how crucial it is to block off portions of the map, but it also serves as the number one way I know if a run is going to go well or not. If I don’t luck into at least a few more via the random upgrades you pick from at the end of each round (or better yet, the upgrade that makes the barricades I have twice as large) I’m probably gonna have a rough time when the going gets tough.
Boosting the number or shape of your barricades is far from a sure thing, though, because even though each player gets to pick a new upgrade card from a set of three randomized options at the end of every wave – six per level and a bonus at the end – there are so many of these “thread” cards in the mix, especially as you unlock more and more with in-game achievements, that it’s easy to wind up with everything but.
My other issue with how barricades are handled is that, when you’re playing in co-op, the team’s supply is evenly divided between you and your teammates. It sounds fair, but it’s often annoying when you’re the person with the plan but have to stop halfway through executing it to call over whoever has barricades left and instruct them on where to place them. Also, if a barricade breaks during combat, the most barricade-minded person is going to be the one who’s completely out and has to call someone else to rush over and plug the hole. So while it makes sense to have traps and cash divided between teammates because it encourages you to use each of your inventory slots wisely and synergize which death dealers work well together, I feel like barricades would’ve been much better off as a shared pool.
To be fair, some of those other thread cards can be quite powerful, so not all is lost if you don’t draw barricades. They could lend your default attacks major bonuses to ammo capacity, give them burn, freeze, or shock damage, or provide extra uses of special abilities, among many other things. Wren, for example, can have four proximity mines out at a time by default, but I’ve raised that as high as seven. One card makes you shoot extra-large projectiles for some reason (they don’t do more damage, they’re just big). But none I’ve seen matches the impact of having more barricades, which makes even the Cursed card that grants 10 additional blocks but makes all your traps cost 10 times more potentially worthwhile if you’re on a team of three or four (their traps aren’t affected).
Which traps you put where is the other big part of the puzzle, and since you can only carry a handful of them with you (especially in co-op) for each level, you have to carefully examine the map layout to see where you can place the best combos of floor, wall, and ceiling traps to both deal damage and rack up scoring combos with multiple types of damage on single targets (which charge up your most powerful abilities). There are a few dozen of these, the vast majority of which are old stalwarts like the Brimstone floor tiles that set enemies ablaze, flippers that launch them into the sea, arrow walls right out of Indiana Jones, saw traps, freeze traps, acid traps, poison traps, you name it. A few new ones round out the arsenal, such as the harpoon that snags enemies to pull them in and a heavy ice turret – I’ll be interested to see how the creative types out there combine all of these.
Enemy variety is also largely recycled from Orcs Must Die! 3’s dozens of trolls, ogres, elementals, flying guys, and hunters who ignore traps and barricades to chase down Warmages, but it does build at least a bit on what came before with around a dozen or so new types. The Stonebat, for example, petrifies you with a projectile that takes you out of the action for several seconds and can be extremely annoying if you don’t take them out, and there’s an orc suspended by a balloon that seems functionally similar to the various bats but takes a few more hits. There’s also a big floating cyclops who sails over traps and then blasts you with a damage-hose laser beam from his eye if you stand between him and the rift, a drummer who doesn’t attack but buffs other orcs, shielded ogres, troll archers, and a lizardman thief who hunts you down and steals your coins, among others. All in all it’s a more than healthy mix that keeps things interesting for a long while.
At the end of each map you’re given the option to cash out with the money you’ve made thus far or wager half of it on whether or not you’ll be able to beat the next map before enough orcs make it to your rift, which has a persistent “health.” It’s a smart mechanic because sometimes you’ll just barely eke out a win with one or two rift points remaining and have to make a call about whether to go on or go home and level up, and I much prefer this to feeling like I had to beat every level of previous OMD games without a single orc making it through my defenses to really feel like I’d beaten it.
If you make it to the boss fights, Deathtrap at least makes an effort to change up its style: there’s only one large wave to deal with and you get a big chunk of change to spend, but there’s an extra powerful enemy walking or teleporting around the map while you do it. So you can go all-in on inflicting as much damage on them as possible or try to hold out until you exhaust the wave of enemies before turning your attention to the main target. But in my experience, the boss fights don’t turn any major ideas on their heads.
Win or lose, you’ll return to your fortress and use your cash to buy permanent upgrades that are sometimes meaningful, like the ones to each individual Warmage that unlock or amplify abilities or let you do +50% damage to bosses, and others that give you an almost imperceptibly incremental improvement to trap damage, speed, or other stats. Given that upgrades often get dramatically more expensive as you go, it can be a bit frustrating to spend so much for so little to improve your chances on the next run.
What eventually slowed my progress to a crawl was the fact that as you progress from one map to the next in your run, the orcs steadily get stronger and more durable rather than more numerous. In the first mission you’ll tear through waves solo, one-shotting most enemies before they can even reach your kill zone. But by the fourth, I was emptying entire 45-bolt crossbow magazines into a single heavy orc’s face and having to stop to reload before polishing him off. It gets tiring, frankly, especially when dealing with enemies with magical armor that diminish the impact of your weapons and traps even further.
Considering that each run consists of several missions, starting with three and going up by one every time you beat a boss, runs become excessively long. I’ve beaten two, so I currently have to do five missions of six waves apiece before the boss fight, and each one can take around half an hour. You can save between missions in single-player but not in co-op, so that becomes a serious time commitment if you’re playing as a team. Also, I wish there were a way to skip the first one or two missions, which are effectively a foregone conclusion for me now, and go straight to the challenging ones.
While I’m on my feature wishlist, this four-player co-op game (which has full cross-play support between PC and Xbox/Game Pass, though not cross-progression) is notably without split-screen functionality of any kind.
You cheeky monkey.
One of the biggest surprises of 2024 was undoubtedly Black Myth: Wukong, an action RPG from Chinese developer Game Science. Though not necessarily regarded as one of the all-time greats, it was certainly well-received and went on to sell an extraordinary amount of copies within a very short timeframe; reportedly over 18 million in just two weeks.
Naturally, then, this means that some sort of knock-off has inevitably appeared on the Nintendo Switch eShop, though the exceedingly blatant nature of this one has made it necessary for us to at least warn you not to fall for such shenanigans.
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