"You'd need to be Trapt indoors to play this"

On paper, Trapt sounds like an interesting game; use traps of differing levels of violence and gore to hinder the people trying to kill you. As you have no melee attacks or any other kind of defence, you have to rely on these traps by luring the enemies into their path and triggering them.

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Storyline (4/10)
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You play as Allura, who happens to be the princess of the country. Her father is murdered by an assassin, and her stepmother claims control of the country and tells everyone that it was Allura who killed the King and orders for her to be killed. Allura runs away and you discover that she has been possessed by a demon who allows her to control traps and kill people with them.

Not an awe-inspiring script but it serves to give a reason to why these people are after you and why you shouldn't feel guilty about killing them. However, poor storyline aside, the reason this gets a 4/10 is for the terrible translation job that was done on this game, not only is there engrish, but more often than not the subtitled sentences make no sense or don't follow on from what was just said. Also, with only a small grasp of Japanese, I've managed to tell that some of the subtitles are nothing like what they're actually saying. The problem with it is that it makes the game pretty much impossible to get involved with thus making the game pretty dull.

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Gameplay (5/10)
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As mentioned, in order to prevent your death, you use Allura to set traps and then lure the enemies into them. You can only have three traps active at any one time, assigned to the triangle, square and x buttons. You're pretty much given free reign to put them wherever you want, and you can use them in conjunction with each other to create combos. For example, use a spring trap to throw an enemy in the path of a guillotine. There are also ‘dark illusions' which are stage specialities that are particularly gruesome ways to kill people and can only be used once per chapter.

The battle system is pretty unique, and I can't think of another game to use traps in this manner. It also allows the player to be pretty imaginative in the way that the traps are used, and you can create some pretty powerful and fun ways to abuse the enemies. However, it doesn't remain fun for very long; once you've found an effective way you killing people, you'll learn there's not much point deviating from it, as you'll probably end up dead. The release of the traps is pretty clumsy, and sometimes they don't activate properly, and although the dark illusions are pretty awesome the first time you watch them, soon they're annoying as once started you can't stop them until they're finished. They're also practically impossible to discover without the use of a guide, as they need to be activated before use, and the ways of doing so are incredibly obscure.

The enemies are also some of the worst in any game ever; they're slow to move, most of the time get stuck behind obstacles, and most annoyingly, are really difficult to line up with your traps.

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Graphics (6/10)
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Not the prettiest of games, but the graphics are pretty enough and the character detail is good enough. However, they aren't really that many environments and thus not a whole bunch to explore.

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Sounds (4/10)
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Not sure if this is a problem with every copy of the game, but in mine, the background music stops at random, and the japanese voice acting skips in the cutscenes .In some ways it's a blessing as the music isn't that great and the voice acting is pretty bad. The sounds effects when you use the traps on people are pretty good, with some realistic bone crunching sounds.

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Summary (4/10)
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The game has some major faults, most of which render the game pretty much unplayable. It has some fun hidden inside it, but you have to have a lot of patience in order to extract it. Maybe worth a rental, but doesn't really warrant the price tag associated with it.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/20/07