Trapt
Cons: The game never evolves from the action seen in the first level
No, this isn't a game about some manufactured band that had one hit people kind of sort of remember. It's actually the long-awaited sequel to the cult-hit PlayStation series Deception. And despite the name change, things have pretty much remained the same in this rather unique action series.
Take You On
Deception has a nice hook. Rather than fighting off your foes in the traditional sense--in face to face combat--the game's heroine is actually incapable of defending herself, or physically inflicting damage on others. Instead, she needs to lure her enemies into various traps throughout the spooky old mansion she's holed up in. Traps that can either be set by her, or which are already a part of her surroundings.
The fun bit, though, is not just dropping chandeliers on your pursuers, or having them run over explosive mines. The fun is using a mixture of standard traps with your own concoctions in order to set up combos. For instance, in the torture chamber, you'll find a spiked wheel against one wall. Set a spring floor trap in front of said wheel, and catapult your enemy into it. Once impaled on the spikes, they'll roll down the stairs and suffer damage from the electric chair waiting at the bottom. Fire them across the room at that point, and they'll find themselves stuck to a spiked floor, which will then raise and make them targets for the razor-sharp, swinging pendulum on the ceiling.
One-Trick Pony
It's all great fun…for a little while, at least. But after skewering, crushing, burning, and piercing four or five bounty hunters in a row--folks that enter the house one by one like lambs to the slaughter--you realize that Trapt is a one-trick pony. The multiple traps you can build and use are all just different plays on the same technique (one is a falling rock, the next is a falling iron sphere, the next is a falling rock on fire, and so on), keeping the strategy stuck in an infinite loop.
Instead, to make things more difficult, the enemies just get a bit more aware of their surroundings, which usually involve them jumping out of the way just when you spring whichever trap they happen to be standing next to. It all starts to feel very cheap and frustrating as you near the end of the adventure, not to mention mind-numbing since you've been doing the exact same thing over and over again for hours on end.
A Winner is You!
Trapt isn't the prettiest game on the PlayStation 2, to be sure, but the graphics get the job done. The house is nice and big, and the character models have a sort of goth-chic thing going on. In fact, the women look like some sort of S&M nightmare, with even the innocent lead character dressed in a getup that would make Larry Flynt blush.
The Achilles heel of the presentation is that the game's graphics slow down drastically whenever you have a lot of traps going on. That and the horribly written English subtitles, which are rife with misspellings and grammar that'll make you cringe. And since Tecmo decided to retain the original Japanese voice acting for the US release of Trapt, reading this mess is the only way to figure out what's going on.
It's interesting to note that everyone in the game refers to the main character--Allura--as Alicia. Nice continuity there.
A Pleasant Diversion
Trapt would be a decent budget title, with its extremely limited, repetitive gameplay and generally low production values. As it is, this game isn't worth a $50 purchase when there are so many other good titles hitting the PlayStation 2 this holiday season. However, it is worth checking out, if just as a weekend rental.