Deception III: Dark Delusion (PS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.0 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Joe Fielder
• Reviewed on: 02/29/2000
• Updated on: 04/28/2000
• Released on: 03/01/2000
• Originally published on GameSpot: Deception III: Dark Delusion (PS) Review

Most role-playing games cast you as a hero who enters dungeons and castles in search of treasure and who fights with monsters while avoiding traps. Tecmo's Deception trilogy, on the other hand, can be seen as something of a reverse RPG. Here, you wait for warriors and wizards to come to you and then try to catch them in your traps. As in Square's Final Fantasy series, the story in each new Deception has nothing to do with that of the last. In the first, you played as a man; the second, a woman; and the third, a woman again. Evil kings and nobles always come into play, and you kill them by setting your traps, acting as their bait, and springing your snares at the right moment. That's all the background that really needs to be covered, save for noting that the developers' fast and loose take on both translation and spelling make for many unintentional comedic moments.

While the Deception III recipe is largely the same as before, there have been several changes and improvements. This iteration introduces the option to create your own traps out of several elements: basics, emblems, rings, and orbs. The basics you can choose from include bear traps to snag an enemy's feet, spikes that shoot from the wall, and swinging bladed pendulums. Emblems give the traps additional strength in a handful of different ways, such as making them explosive or serving as electrical conduits. Rings are an extra layer that you can use to, say, reduce the time it takes for a trap to charge or to set a trap to go off automatically when someone trips it, while orbs are an expensive way to increase a device's overall power. Once a trap is made, you can even go back and add or subtract parts, although this costs money that you unfortunately don't recoup by breaking the device down.

There are also two new game modes: trap license and expert mode. The former is essentially a second training stage, while the latter requires you to accomplish a series of assignments such as performing a four-hit combo or earning 500 points in less than forty seconds. This may sound good and challenging on paper, but in practice it turns out clumsy and unrealized. If the traps you've earned don't suit a specific task in expert mode, you're simply out of luck, as you're not allowed a lot of room for experimentation. Need three devices to toss someone out of a room? If you didn't need to do this in the main game it's unlikely you'll have enough points to pay for the traps to do it now.

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