Review: Deception IV; Blood Ties

It all starts with the right kind of bait.

Imagine being able to lure foes into the most intricate setups of traps you ever came up with. With the amount of variety given to players are able to essentially build their imaginations desires.

The game is a revisit of Tecmo’s 1996 PlayStation game Devil’s Deception. You defeat enemies by luring them into a wide variety of traps; the aim of the game is to prevent the enemy from reaching the player, exclusively using traps with no other attacks available besides those you set in place.

The main plot is about a girl named Laegrinna, the devil’s daughter who was created from a fragment of his soul. Three thousand years ago, the devil was defeated by twelve warriors known as the Saints where they used something called the Holy Versesto verses to imprison him. The verses where divided into 12 items and given to the Saints and their descendants to keep them hidden.

Laegrinna is tasked with finding the Holy Verses from the descendants of the Saints so the seal imprisoning her father can be broken. Helping in her mission are Caelea, Veruza and Lilia, daemons who control the different aspects of traps the player is given to use throughout the game. Storywise it wasn’t enough to keep me really following it; I became more interested when they would allow me to get to the combat.

Devising trap combinations is incredibly addicting. You can choose to utilize a variety of different traps, including boulders, electrocution, spring boards, spiked walls, human cannons, banana peels, falling pumpkins, and locomotives. Timing plays a big aspect as you have to set them off manually in a specific order to get higher combos and get the most bang out of whatever setup you come up with.

My favorite combination of mine was luring enemies into an outside area of the castle that had a chariot circling the courtyard swinging a saber and a mace; I would setup a spring board to launch them toward some stairs. Once there I would allow a pumpkin to drop onto their head causing them to stumble up some stairs into a push panel that would have them drop into a cannon then fire them into a cage which would allow me to capture them.

You can be injured by your own setups so be sure when you set off a particular sequence that you are free from harm. I can’t tell you how many times I forgot about the swinging guillotine and ended up aiding my enemies instead of hindering them.

Trap combinations are categorized in three ways: Brutality, Magnificence, or Humiliation. There is also environmental traps that are set within different  The PlayStation Vita version of the game has touch controls for setting up traps and placing them but I felt it was perfectly fine to ignore them and just use the standard face buttons and analog sticks.

Graphically the game looks very sharp and there aren’t any rough edges around characters or set pieces. The game also has anime flair when it comes to dialog sequences, so characters do show emotion as well as not speak in English.

I had fun trying to come up with higher combos and traps that were effective while keeping in mind strengths and weaknesses of opponents. Some enemies have resistances to traps of certain types; Fast enemies aren’t able to be snared for instance, while Armor wearing enemies have to have their armor broken before traps do the intended damage.

The modes include: Story, Tutorial, Free Battle, Missions, Cross Quests, and Museum. Cross Quests mode is where you can post quest you’ve created and download new quests online. This is definitely a way to lengthen the life of the title and have more variety after you have finished with the main story.

Free Battle allows you to select any map you would like to utilize, amount of enemies and type, then practice your trap combos to help get the most out of any thing you can muster. Museum of course allows you to view play records, watch replays, and check out the enemy compendium and even the online leaderboard.

Fans of the series will definitely feel at home with the familiarity and setup of the game. Though the story is a bit linear the real shine is the combinations of trap setups a player can achieve. I found myself quickly wanted to get to the next segment so I can unlock more traps to further increase my resourcefulness in the face of adversity.

It was an overall pleasant experience and can even get those who never have played any of the previous games into its niche genre. It looked and performed flawlessly on the PlayStation Vita without any slowdowns or cause for concern.  I did not get a chance to test the cross platform play as I didn’t have a PlayStation 3 handy, my take would be the controls would be just as fluid there as well.

Deception IV: Blood Ties was a nice introduction for me to the series and its game-play, I would definitely recommend this title to those wanting something more outside the box for their PlayStation Vita library. Total Download Size was only 679mb in total, so acquiring it by digital distribution is definitely a tempting method as it doesn’t take much space and can be a great pass the time game.

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