So, after sinking another 100 hours into a game I vehemently rejected after they killed my favorite mode, I suppose I've returned to playing Orcs Must Die! Unchained daily. It still stings they killed my favorite MOBA-like of last year, and their new competitive mode is garbage I only tolerate for daily quests, but with the addition of Chaos Trials in the last patch, I feel like I can now suggest trying it if it sounds interesting.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained, or OMDU, is an online free-to-play sequel to Orcs Must Die, a third-person tower defense game released when those were still all the rage. The original stood out by using traps instead of towers (including physics traps that flung hapless orcs across the map) and bringing Tom & Jerry-ish absurdity to the mass slaughter of cartoonishly stupid orcs. OMDU expands upon the 2-player coop mode in Orcs Must Die 2 by making 3-player co-op the norm, with several characters to choose from and a few dozen traps to upgrade and customize. Playing levels grinds out skulls, traps, and XP necessary to tackle the nastier levels, but once you began 5-starring the most difficult levels, that was it. All that was left was seeing how far you could get in Endless mode (which only has 6 levels) or playing competitive Sabotage, which is the worst competitive mode I've ever played in a game.

Imagine a competitive mode where you never saw the other team, like Vs Tetris with the other side blacked out. Imagine instead of nail-biting turnarounds, 90% of matches are decided in the first 3 minutes yet still take 15 minutes to resolve. On top of that, all of the special abilities come from randomly-drawn cards you won from other matches instead of from how well you are doing. Oh, and using a card consumes it, so if you fell behind in the first 3 minutes, there's negative incentive to use them. It is the worst parts of pay-to-win multiplayer without the joy of actively fighting your opponents. Remembering they replaced Siege mode with this makes me die a little inside each time, and knowing they originally intended for this to give the game replayability makes my skin crawl.

Fortunately, the devs followed up that horrible idea with Chaos Trials, which extends the replayability of the cooperative mode by adding random modifiers to the regular stages, such as doubling the cost of ceiling traps, adding highly-dangerous TNT archers to each wave, or making the minions immune to a certain type of damage. Beat the stage with those modifiers and the game gives you a new stage with more modifiers tacked on; the initial TNT Archers with No Mana Drops become more difficult when your Barricades cost 3x as much to place and you dance every time a boss is killed. The game continues adding modifiers until you fail 3 stages, at which point you have to restart from the beginning with a new Chaos Trial.

The third set of Chaos Trials I tried had triple-cost Barricades on a stage which normally required a lot of Barricades to create a maze for the minions. Facing the prospect of going broke just constructing the maze, we quickly improvised a new route which used less Barricades and tried it out. It worked. The next modifiers were double-cost Wall traps and Barricade-destroying TNT Archers. Our party leader swore. That's when I realized I would really like Chaos Trials.

With their inclusion, I feel the game finally has some legs again (after they were chopped off with the removal of Siege). I no longer plan to drop the game once I finally 5-star the last levels, and now I can actually recommend other people try it out instead of just treating it like my guilty pleasure. As much as I gripe about its various issues, the core gameplay is fun in a way most F2P games aren't, but the Chaos Trials are the first time I still felt like playing after I put an hour or two into finishing up the daily quests.

I'd guess about 80-90% of MOBA matches are decided within the first 20% of the match almost universally. Granted so are many other things.

Perhaps! But this just feels much, much worse than those. Let me elaborate:

• You win an OMDU Sabotage match by having more Rift Points than your opponent. You lose Rift Points whenever a minion reaches your Rift.
• Players have the fewest traps set up on the 1st wave.
• The number of traps quickly outscales the number of minions, so the farther into the match you are, the easier it is to prevent any minions from reaching your Rift.
• Card strength does not scale with waves; aka an Ogre All-Stars card spawns the same number of ogres whether it's the 1st or the Final Wave.
• As a result, victory often depends upon who can randomly draw the best cards during the 1st Wave. Losing 1 point during the 1st Wave was often enough to doom you for the rest of the match.

That's not even getting into issues with Sabotage's Sudden Death (infinite minions spawned, team that has a minion reach their Rift first loses), where it's possible for certain heroes to indefinitely knockback/crowd-control the minions so they never, ever reach the Rift. (They said they modified it this patch so minions had resistance to knockback/CC in Sudden Death now, but I'm not confident it worked.)

This game is really good, maybe the best free to play game on PS4 since Let It Die has countless flaws and Dungeon Defenders is just mind numbingly boring. Sabotage is trash but just playing the standard survival gameplay is almost identical to the non free to play versions (just with 15 characters instead of 2). The progression system is ridiculously slow because its a free to play game but even with just the basic loadouts/heroes the game is a lot of fun.