Recent reviews by Toasted.Bread

It's just okay, a tentative recommend.
I love the Orcs Must Die series, but this barely feels like an Orcs Must Die game. Deathtrap, in my opinion, feels like a very watered down version of the series.

The first few missions, I played solo, the game was extremely easy. While there's a barricade limit, they're free, and you're given enough to route all orc doors into one path on all maps minus the boss maps. So you're able to choke all of the enemies except fliers to a single path from the moment you start a mission. Then you're given a rather large starting pool of money to place traps, of which even before you start unlocking new traps you have a full array. So long as you don't fully block paths to the rift, there's no enemies in this game that actively destroy barricades like the sappers, at worst they'll take collateral damage if you're nearby to them. Switching to co-op and the enemies get a little bit more spongier, the barricades are split between all of the players so you have to coordinate placement of them. Other than that having more players just means you can cover more and makes things even easier in most circumstances. There seems to be no banter between characters, at least not that I've noticed. (edit: I'm not sure if it was coincidence, a bug that I hadn't seen it yet, or an update, but I've finally seen my first set of sappers ever, and I saw a new[?] mission thread which spawns two sappers every wave. It was only two sappers on one random wave, but they do exist)

Almost every trap I've tried thus far feels like a lesser version of it's previous incarnation from older games if they were available. The one exception of note being the auto-ballista which has the fastest reset time in the game except for the traps that don't have reset times(but deal basically no damage). Traps now reset so painfully slowly that many of them just feel useless. The new upgrade system allows you to shave maybe 20% of the reset time off of most traps, though some don't even have reset time as option. You get more meaningful trap upgrades in the form of threads, which is the roguelike card system that you get one card between waves which persist throughout a run. A normal mode run, though, typically doesn't last long enough to roll the cards you might actually want, and as you play you unlock more cards making it even less likely to get what you want. The new version of endless mode is kind of the only place you can actually stretch your legs and play. But in both standard and endless modes you have basically no control of what you're playing or what you're getting, you pick your first map from a selection of 3 which each have a debuff, then you play six waves on that map, change to another map picked from 3 which also all have debuffs, the debuffs persist across all maps in a run. The entirety of the roguelike aspect of the game is stacking these debuffs at the start of each mission vs the thread buffs each wave.

For lack of a better word, it's a lazy version of a roguelike. Speaking of lazy, there only really seems to be maybe 10 maps in the game, 4 of which are boss maps that unlock after beating the boss. The rest of the time you're playing on the same 5-6 maps, but on a couple of variants which have the same layouts anyway so they don't feel different. There's the normal map in the day, then there's the night version where skeletons pop up in random locations each wave, then the rainy version where water elementals pop up in random locations. At this point I've only seen one map where the rift has multiple possible locations. There's so little variety it's heartbreaking. (edit: update from a couple of days ago introduced re-rolling threads between waves at the cost of 1000 coins or spending 5000 coins to skip all of the cards and add a barricade to your limit. It's small, but it is an improvement. Now they just need to implement a way to re-roll missions if all 3 are bad.)

The last thing I'll touch on is the characters, each has their own weapon and abilities and you can't change them. While the ranged weapon characters are easier to take care of the fliers that go over your barricades towards the rift, the two melee characters feel leagues more powerful. The bear has probably the most bland and boring dialogue bar none, but he's absurdly powerful with big AoE slams, a regenerating shield, two forms of healing, and a lure ability like the old scarecrow. The cat has maybe the most interesting dialogue, which is a very low bar as all the characters have about as much personality as a plain brown paper bag. She also self-heals on crits, has a pretty fast attack speed and decent high crit rate to start so honestly as long as you're aggressive she basically just doesn't die. Of the ranged characters the generic crossbow guy and the wand girl, I can't be bothered to remember their names(paper bags), are probably the best two. Shotgun girl has limited range and you spend a substantial amount of time reloading making her feel sub-optimal outside of areas with ledges to use her knockback attack. The sniper guy is basically just a sniper, his non-zoomed primary attack is horribly inaccurate and deals so little damage along with low ammo capacity he feels useless outside of straight corridors. Even when you are zoomed in and the ability reads that there's no spread, there's still some spread, and occasional glitches depending on the terrain you're standing on where the shot will just go off in a wild direction you're not aiming down. Max is easily unlockable by collecting mirror shards in the lobby, and while it's nice to have him back he constantly comments about how he preferred things the way they used to be. Me too buddy, me too. The best commentary and most of the humor comes from the comments of the Orcs themselves.

I just want to reiterate, I don't hate the game. It's just that I barely consider it to be an Orcs Must Die game. OMD is great, OMD2 is probably the bar for the entire genre, OMD3 the series started to slip but after the DLCs it got better, Unchained doesn't exist anymore and was basically Super Monday Night Combat in an OMD flavor. Deathtrap just feels bland by comparison to previous titles. But if you look at it as it's own thing entirely, it's not the worst way to kill some time with a buddy or three.