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Good: Stupid enemies make you feel smart

Bad: ZERO game variation

Most Ridiculous Character Name: Blizzardo, the Ice Mage

Princess Allura is like a lot of teenage girls. She's awkward, shy, unsure of herself and distrustful of her stepmother. Unlike most teenage girls, she witnesses the murder of her father, the King, her stepmother frames her for his death and she flees to an evil mansion where she must defend herself from her pursuers by luring them onto traps she commands.

Such is the premise for Trapt, the new action/strategy hybrid from Tecmo. A sequel in spirit to the Deception series for the original Playstation, Trapt has the player acting as something akin to a dungeon master. When a trespasser enters the mansion you're given the opportunity to view the area from above. You assign a specific trap to the X, square and triangle buttons and then decide on the placement of each device. You then switch to Allura and attempt to get your prey to walk over that area. It's possible to combine traps and some traps have varying effects depending on which traps they're paired with.

The result is a game that plays like an R rated version of Mousetrap. Catch a thief in a bear trap and then drop a chandelier on his head, greet a group of enemies with a bladed pendulum as the reach the top of the stairs or launch some poor sap into a wall of spikes. Sometimes the effects yield some genuinely funny results, it would've been great if Tecmo included joke traps like grand pianos or metal safes, because sometimes it feels like a Looney Tunes episode.

In theory this is a great concept. Setting traps, anticipating the enemy's moves and coming up with new and original ways to dispatch them should be a blast and entertaining for at least a few hours, right? In practice, however, this just simply is not the case. Trapt is nothing if not an exercise in repetition.

Strategy is nonexistent. In order to get your potential victims to fall for your traps you have to simply run around the playing area as they mindlessly chase you until they finally run over the desired capture point. Once this has happened all you have to do is spring your device, wait for the trap to reset itself and then do it all over again.

The game rarely encourages experimentation with trap combinations. The magnet wall/heavy boulder combo works every time and worse yet, it's available at the game's outset. All you have to do is place them in a high-traffic area and you're set. The magnet wall holds them in place and the boulder smashes them to pieces.

The A.I. doesn't vary its actions no matter what type of character is trying to kill you. Rather than use their range weapons to their advantage archers, wizards and other projectile shooters all follow you just as foolishly as bruisers like the heavily armored knights and the quickly moving thieves.

Trapt comes up short on a technical level as well. For starters the game suffers from crippling slowdown any time there is more than one character on screen and a trap is set off expect the framerate to take a pretty serious dive. I'm talking 15 frames per second or less. I can't fathom how this was allowed to pass the test stage. Having a game lag every time you participate in the central gameplay element is inexcusable. Especially since Trapt isn't pushing any serious particle effects, light and shadow effects, complicated geometry or complex character designs.

It doesn't end there, either. The camera is constantly an issue. It's too close to the character, which makes it impossible to see the location of not only your enemies, but the traps as well. I was constantly rotating the camera in an effort to better see either of those elements and was never successful unless I came to a complete stop.

Frequent load times plague the game as well. Load times for cut scenes. Load times for tutorials. Load times for menus. It's not as bad as Midnight Club for PSP, but it's bad enough that it disrupts any sort of flow to the story or in-game action.

It's an interesting idea that goes almost completely unrealized. Trapt is little more than leading hordes of idiotic characters into pitfall after pitfall until you've reached the credits, but it's the game's failure on a technical level (poor framerate, camera issues, frequent load times) that makes the difference between a casual rent and a game that you're better of avoiding altogether.

Graphics: C

Sound: C

First Play: D+

LastPlay: D

Gameplay: D-

Overall: 63% D