I found myself wanting to play a tower defense game this past week. Specifically one where you can setup traps in a dungeon-like environment, which is apparently niche.
Enter, Orcs Must Die! 3. Stop waves of orcs (and other nasties) from charging into your sacred rift. The orcs are well-modeled, as well as the maps themselves, it looks good. The main characters have a distinct Fortnite-like aesthetic (further exemplified by their Fortnite dances at the end of a mission, since the game released 3 years after the success of Fortnite). I didn't mind this much. The chad-like jawlines of the adult male characters is frankly comical.
Progression is linear, you start with a few basic traps. Your grounded spike trap and wall arrow trap are your bread and butter. After every level in the campaign, you unlock a new trap or usable trinket to use. Your weapon can pack a punch, especially with head shots, but not enough to hold back the horde yourself, especially when they're coming from multiple locations.
New traps are 50/50 on their utility. Either they're great or they are inconsistent or too expensive to be worth using over the standard spike and arrow traps.
Usually in a tower defense, they'll introduce unique enemies to plan around (like lead balloons or stealth balloons in Bloons Tower Defense 5 that require towers that can deal explosive damage or can see stealthed balloons).
One of these is a kobold runner, a little squirt who will run right past most of your traps if you're not careful. There are two traps that are good at slowing down or immobilizing them, but nothing great at killing them, requiring you to deal with them most of the time, which is fine. It's interesting to make the player a specific counter to enemies.
There's also demons, which are exactly the same as the orcs except that they're immune to fire, so any fire upgrades or weapons you use are worthless.
There's not really much counter play to be had. Each enemy has weaknesses and resistances to specific types of elemental or arcane damage but it's incredibly arbitrary, but upgrades to your traps are made between missions with a currency you gain from completing them. I found myself exiting to the menu several times to refund traps I wouldn't be using to put the points into something else (why can't I do this in the inventory before wave 1?)
Furthermore, oftentimes when I was awarded a new trap, it would put me into a map where its utility was limited (No useful ceiling tiles for a ceiling trap) so I couldn't see it in action immediately. You also had to have it kill enemies enough in order to unlock an additional upgrade.
Some maps had big drops near the pathway of the orcs, and I was sorely disappointed that I couldn't capitalize on some form of push trap to send them hurtling to the floor below.
Ultimately, the strategy always became spread out as many spike traps and arrow traps as you can with the rare exception to add a row of archers to guard the rift.
Some missions are War Scenarios, where you have special large traps for the outdoors, my favorite being a giant springboard that can fling normal-sized enemies into any hazard. The ragdolls and screams are humorous. With the exception of the bounce pad, these "outdoor" traps can't be used inside, even if there's room for them to be there.
Ultimately, I felt that I couldn't get creative with my trap placement because a lot of them were either bad or situational (Several didn't work on larger enemies, and there was no specific trap to deal with the damage sponges). At the last mission, I ended up using mainly spike traps, arrow traps, and bounce pads to win.
If the developers tightened their core gameplay loop to have more strategy, enemies that required counter play, the ability to upgrade your traps in-mission, and more money and increased difficulty to fill out all of the empty space of the maps, this could be a good game, but it's just middling. I would recommend passing on this one.