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The Deception series has been a lesser-known favorite of Playstation gamers for nearly a decade now and the latest entrant in that series, Trapt, might serve to equally impress fans of that series while simultaneously disappointing in its execution. Conceptually Trapt looks like it should have worked and have been fun to play but it doesn't deliver on its considerable promise.
Your character, Princess Allura, has been accused of killing her father (King Olaf) and she retreats into a mansion from her pursuers. Inside, a demonic presence described only as "The Fiend" bestows an ability for Allura to create 3 types of traps within the walls of where she has escaped. These traps consist of ceiling, wall, or floor and each has a variety of options from which to choose. The choices that you have increase over time as you accumulate points when you dismiss of your victims. You "create" them (though, not really, they are fairly pre-determined) over the course of the game and can do so with each completed mission, assuming you have enough "points" to buy one.
You can choose from 9 different traps to be utilized in each of your missions before you set out on your endeavor, 3 for each type of trap. The game plays like a 3rd person shooter without bullets and you can set traps on the fly and execute them with a push of a button as your opponent crosses over them. Each trap takes a while to recharge and then you can use it again – chalk this up to The Fiend's magic, I suppose. The game play is very unique in that I've never run across anything quite like this and for a title to come across as unlike any other is a very difficult thing to achieve. Trapt, however, has some serious problems in execution of an otherwise excellent idea.
First, you have to draw your mostly mindless opponents into the area in which your trap is effective and this proceeds at a heinously slow pace. You aren't really running, you aren't really walking, and you rarely feel seriously threatened by your pursuers. Over and over again you try to get these poor slobs into your zone and spring your trap. They get injured or die and then 2 more opponents enter the room and you have to repeat this process over and over and over again. Some of the opponents start avoiding your traps and, in the later levels, seem to avoid traps with almost supernaturally fast steps. Of course, you eventually nail them and those that follow and the mission is a success. The camera is best controlled from a complete stop and it's difficult to explain that while you're "running" you have to stop in order to see where your opponents are in order to spring the trap. Now, if I were your opponent and you suddenly stopped as if waiting for me to step in a particular area then I would choose a different path. Furthermore, there is absolutely no desperation in your attempts to flee because of how slowly everything is going. And, if that weren't bad enough, every mission has a point where you can heal any and all damage that you might have taken just by stepping over a magical healing icon. The game would've been much much better from a top down or 3/4 perspective wherein you really have to actively run and execute traps simultaneously. Even with the third-person view, if the whole thing had been faster with an on screen map, it would've been a heck of a lot more fun.
Equally, the game suffers from slowness in nearly every other area. I was thirty minutes into the game of playtime and the real time that I was sitting there must've been approaching 2 or 3 hours. The cinematics are slow to load with misspelled words, terrible English, and a plot that probably would've been interesting if I had some mastery of the Japanese language. As it stands, however, it just adds to the plodding pace with which the game progresses. The mission screens leads to other screens wherein you can pick traps, buy new traps, buy new keys to various parts of the mansion (though, I don't know who you're buying these from), embark on a side story (as if the main one weren't enough), or look at information of all the people that you've destroyed. Even the deaths of your opponent are drawn out as each always has some remark before expiring in the exact same pool of blood that everyone else had flow from their body. Equally, before the start of every mission, each opponent has to get in some verbiage before progressing with the chase.
Visually, the game looks like an early PlayStation 2 game and hardly like one that's developed this late in the system's life span. Equally, the game slows to a crawl pace when multiple opponents are in the same trap onscreen at the same time. The frame rate drops like a rock. The story has Japanese audio and English subtitles. In this day and age, subtitling should be a thing of the past and you shouldn't have to read the entire story, but that's a minor nitpick. The score and music are nicely done.
Trapt, from a conceptual standpoint, is a grand idea that might be better executed some time in the future either on different hardware or with a different execution on its game play. As it stands, it's something that's worth experiencing for a while but certainly not something that I'd part with 50 beans over. Try before you buy.
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