Trapt PS2 Review

Publisher: Tecmo  Developer: Tecmo, Paon  Genre: RPG  Players: 1  Age Rating: 12+  Other console/handheld formats: PS3

Setting traps for your enemies is something that should translate into a game very well. What sounds more fun than impaling your foes on moving walls, dropping various things on their heads, and burning them up amongst other wicked things. Trapt sounds great, in fact it could have been a classic, but when all comes to all this is one shoddy piece of entertainment.

Princess Allura is in a bit of a bind, her father is murdered and she stands accused. She flees into a mansion and after being possessed by a demon starts doing nasty things to those who oppose her. The story is interesting enough, but is sadly marred by an amateurish translation, and as the game is voiced only in Japanese you’ll find yourself reading sentences with obvious words amiss as well as some nasty and often hilarious mistakes.

The concept is excellent of Trapt, but the execution isn’t as good as I would have hoped for from such a game. Princess Allura doesn’t look much like a sword swinging heroine perhaps, but thanks to her possessed state she’s still able to lay traps and lead her foolish enemies into them. No lack of imagination has been spared, with gruesome death-traps causing your enemies plenty of pain.

Make no mistake about it this is one sadistic game, and making your enemies squeal seems to have been the development teams intention. You set traps up exactly how and where you want them, and to give the game a little credit, it isn’t completely lacking in the brains department as it allows the player to set obstacles up in a way that can lead to combos. It has to be said that knocking your game down with a swinging pendulum, then impaling them on a wall and dropping a rock on their head is a satisfying thing to do, and also rewards you with extra money, which can buy you new traps or keys that give you access to other rooms in your location.

It’s a case of setting your traps up, waiting for them to charge, and then when you see fit pressing the face button corresponding to the trap you want to spring. There’s nothing more to it, you could write what the game entails on the back of your hand and still have space to fill, such is the overly simplistic nature of it all. That’s alright for some games, but in Trapt it’s a disaster.

It’s interesting to begin with, but it becomes tired all too soon for my liking. I have got to question why the game couldn’t have been given something to help break up the repetition; a little exploration could have done wonders to the playability in-between the trap-setting sections for example. But there’s none of this, and things soon become unbearably stagnant.