Bandit Trap Review — This is my House, I have to Defend it!

Many of those who, as children, looked longingly at the screen while watching the classic film Home Alone and wished and wished that they could fill their home with clever booby traps to unleash upon unsuspecting robbers likely grew up to be arrested for assault and battery or manslaughter. The rest instead played Bandit Trap.

If that opening paragraph was not enough for your imagination to decipher, Bandit Trap is a game designed around the fantasy introduced in Home Alone: preparing a series of dangerous, downright wacky traps throughout the home to prevent your valuable goods from being stolen, undoubtedly causing property damage that far outprices the precious goods you protected in the first place.

Honestly, the game plays remarkably similar to Ghost Keeper, another title I reviewed not too long ago. Both games have you setting up proximity traps throughout a household and waiting for hostile characters to stumble into them and trigger zany animations and crazy amounts of damage.

Bandit Trap differs in a few ways beyond its concept, but the most notable is that it is a completely online experience. Matchmaking pairs one player, who takes on the role of the trapper, with three burglars, with the trapper tasked with setting up various booby traps throughout the map to try and prevent the burglars from escaping with ten precious items.

The multiplayer element is fun and adds a lot more replayability to the concept, both because matchmaking against real players adds unpredictability to the gameplay and because the progression track gives you something to work towards.

The gameplay itself is pretty simple: the trapper can set traps around the map and try to avoid the burglars, who can physically harm the trapper and can only be stopped or stunned by traps. Burglars have an arsenal of tools to disable traps and harm the trapper, and the trapper can move through unique passages, lock doors, and manually trigger or control traps for extra damage.

While I’m sure there is a deeper meta to the trapper gameplay, I found that the game quickly sort of devolved into me using my favorite traps (the fire spewer and hammer) and just chasing after bandits to hit them when they were distracted. This could just be a skill issue, but I felt like the game could add a bit more to incentivize actual trap setting and patience, as opposed to just possessing furniture for a damage bonus and chasing bandits down to make sure your trap doesn’t miss.

The game could also use more maps, and I would like to see even more traps and tools added, but considering it’s a live-service game, I’m sure these additions will come eventually.

The most interesting part of the game for me is the ability to combine traps into stronger, more unique versions, the recipes for which are unlocked through progression. Things like the fire hammer or the homing fist take the already zany cartoon violence inherent in the game and turn it up a notch, and I think playing fully into this cartoon aesthetic was a brilliant choice that works in the game’s favor.

This cartoonish, unserious nature injects much-needed levity into the asymmetrical multiplayer genre, often defined by toxic players, sweaty strategies, and an almost universally accepted reputation for being “unfun.” It is hard to take the competitive elements of the game seriously when you are flying across the screen with your ass on fire, being bonked on the head by a big ol’ hammer, or watching a big extendo-glove sucker punch your friend down a flight of stairs.

For what it is, Bandit Trap is great. It is an incredibly unique take on the concept of asymmetrical multiplayer games and stands utterly alone in its genre, being the only “multiplayer Home Alone-like” I can name. The progression injects some extra fun into the title, but I would be lying if I did not tell you that the game kind of got repetitive after the first hour. There is not enough in the game to really inject a lot of variety into how matches are played, and grinding to unlock new combination traps quickly becomes your goal as you get your fill of what the trapper role has to offer fairly quickly. You have to really love the gameplay, because there is not a whole lot to mix it up and not a lot to offer you outside of it beyond cosmetic rewards.

The only real, concrete, non-subjective flaw I could find with the game came with the frame rate. While the game ran just fine for me, it weirdly could not get beyond 60 FPS and often dropped below 50 as I played. It was not enough to really distract me from the experience, but I was also not sure what the game had to show me that could be such a drain on my frame rate.

The game currently has a smaller player base and, overall, seems to have gone underappreciated and remained under the radar since its launch. I hope this review can change that and help the game get the level of attention it deserves. It has its flaws, and it feels like more content could be added to flesh it out and add some variety to the gameplay, but it is still a very fun game and one that stands utterly alone in what could very well be its own genre. Give Bandit Trap a try; I do not think you will regret it, and get your friends to join in while you are at it.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Bandit Trap. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Bandit Trap is available on Steam, Epic Games, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.