It’s always a downer when a game you really like at its core is dragged down by external factors. Such is the case with Trap Da Gang (Free), the latest release from Japanese publisher Obokaid’em Games. The basic gameplay is challenging, fun, and wonderfully reminiscent of vintage arcade games from the mid-1980s. But being a free game, it also has an economy that you have to deal with, and while that’s not always bad in principle, the extra cruft it brings to the game hurts it. It’s still a fun game, but I couldn’t help but wish there were some way to play it in a purer form.
Trap Da Gang‘s premise is simple. Enemies will come across the screen from the right-hand side along one of four rows and try to make their way to the doors on the left-hand side of the screen. If they succeed, you lose a heart. Lose all of your heart, and it’s game over. Most of the time, you have no direct way of attacking the enemies. Instead, you have to use a collection of items including ladders, springboards, banana peels, and dogs to redirect the enemies in such a way that they’ll hit one of the explosives littering the screen. Defeat enough enemies, and you’ll move on to the next stage.
As you go further into the game, the enemies will bring new tricks to the board, such as mecha-suits that allow them to take an extra hit or ladders they can use to change rows on their own. A few stages in, innocent people enter the mix, and if you let them walk into anything dangerous, you’ll lose a heart. Since you’re limited as to the number of objects you can have in play at a time, you’ll have to work constantly to make sure the baddies are lined up with bombs and the goodies aren’t. Then there are the clowns, who carry special boxes that contain special items, extra hearts, or points. If they reach the left side of the screen, you won’t take damage, but you won’t get the item they’re carrying either. You’ll want to make sure you’re exploding these clowns, because your odds of survival without any of the special items aren’t great.
These items include things like screen-clearing smart bombs, missiles that clear out a whole row at once, a refrigerator that temporarily stops time, and an even bigger and scarier dog than usual. You can only hold onto a few of these items at one time, and the clowns come along fairly often, so don’t be shy about using them. That said, if you want to maximize your points, it’s better to hold on to them. If your stock is full when you take out a clown, you’ll get some extra points instead. As with many classic arcade games, your goal is simply to get as far as you can and build as big of a score as possible, so if you can hack it without emptying your stock of special items, it’s certainly worth your while.
The presentation goes for a deliberate retro style with good success, and since all you’re doing is dragging and dropping items, the controls are pretty hard to argue with. The game supports Game Center achievements and leaderboards, so there’s lots of stuff to aim for. I also appreciate the way the game gradually becomes more and more complex. It makes for a nice curve, albeit one that skyrockets in difficulty pretty quickly. On its basic merits, Trap Da Gang is a fine game, one that’s surprisingly hard to put down, even.
And yet, sooner or later, you will put it down. Not necessarily because you want to, but because you must. Since Trap Da Gang is a free-to-play game with no IAP, you’re probably wondering what the catch is. Well, one other way the game apes classic arcade games is that every play will cost you some in-game money. Every 20 minutes, a chest appears on the title screen that will give you at least one more play, and there are various opportunities to watch ads to earn more of that in-game currency. It essentially works out to be a stamina meter with a 20-minute-or-less timer. Less than optimal, but it’s still workable, especially as you get good enough at the game that a single play lasts you close to that amount of time.
I have a bigger problem with the other uses of that currency. You can use it to continue if you get a game over, picking up at the stage you left off on, but with a score of zero. That at least shows some consideration for keeping things fair between players, but I feel it does issues to the table with regards to score competition. You can also use that currency to buy some special power-ups to start the game with, and I just plain don’t care for that. While the lack of IAP means that nobody is buying their way to success, players who have more gems have an unfair advantage over those who don’t. That taints the score competition that I feel lies at the very heart of games like Trap Da Gang. If you want to give yourself the best chance of racking up a high score on any given run, you’ll want to grab some of those special items. In doing that, you are certain to spend your currency far faster than you’ll earn it. That limits the amount of time you can play at any one time, and there’s absolutely no way to buy your way around it even if you wanted to.
This creates a dilemma. If you only use your gems to play, it’s relatively easy to build up a surplus or at least break even after a little practice, especially if you don’t mind watching an ad here and there. That’s all well and good if you’re only planning on challenging your own scores, but if you want to compete against other players on the leaderboard, such an approach isn’t really feasible. If you’re not interested in score attacking at all and simply want to see all of the stages, you’ll likely have to take advantage of the continues you can buy.
Trap Da Gang is a nice throwback to simpler times, and while the proverbial quarters were rolling, I had a lot of fun playing it. While I can certainly appreciate that the game has to monetize somehow, I’m not a fan of score attack games doing so in a way that affects the balance of the playing field. It undermines the fairness of the whole enterprise, and when it comes to this kind of game, that’s a fairly devastating blow. The gameplay is enjoyable enough that I’d recommend giving it a try, at least, but I imagine most players will quickly grow weary of waiting for another turn at the machine.
