It's A: Deathtrap Launching On Early Access Oct 22nd

Given the comments on our article about the closed beta, a lot of people are disappointed or nervous about Orcs Must Die!'s trip from cheery, co-op tower defense game to cheery, free-to-play MOBA-like. Deathtrap may satisfy, then.

It's being made by Neocore, creators of The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing, and it hopes to blend tower defense with action-RPG mechanics. It has co-op and competitive modes, it has traps and waves of creeps, and it's just been announced that it's coming to Early Access on October 22nd.

Here's a trailer from when the game was first announced back in August, which I think is supposed to be comically violent but which I actually find a little disturbing:

Gross. The game's site bills it as "the goriest Tower Defense game ever," which I guess someone else will like. I've clearly grown soft.

There are other features that I do enjoy the thought of, like the aforementioned co-op, or the integrated map and monster editors. It's a shame that there's only two videos released so far, and that neither does much to dig into the particulars of the feature set. October 22nd isn't far away, so I wonder exactly how early this Early Access will be.

I've never played the Van Helsing games - John informs me that they're solid if unremarkable - but I was a fan of Neocore's other series, King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame. It blended campaign map and real-time battles together in ways akin to Total War, but in a world of magic and fantasy creatures where you were as likely to stumble across a piece of choose-your-own-adventure interactive fiction as you were a Lord of the Rings-sized war.