Trine – The journey so far
UPDATE: Finished the game.
Need more visitors to fullfil the attention whore in me, so lets do a mini review type thing.
Trine was released on the steam store yesterday, i highly recommed you try the demo and/or buy the full game. Apparently it can be found on PSN on the PS3 aswell. For the PC you could actually buy the disk, from a shop, but everywhere seems to be alot more expensive than steam.
Anywho, to the game. First of all, i havnt finished it, didnt start playing til very late and stopped at 1am so this is just a review of how its going so far. The game itself is a 3D sidescroller, you know, 3D graphics but you can only move on a 2D plane. Theres fighting with a variety of weapon (more on that soon), basic platofrming and some physics puzzles. It also has some RPG elements, with little green bottles you pickup for experience which you can upgrade skills with, you can also find useful equipment to boost stats and find new skills in chests throughout the game.
To begin with you get to play 3 characters, one after the other.
Theif
She has two main skills to start with, the first being her Bow. As with most bows, the accuracy and power is crap unless you hold the draw until it becomes steady. The range on it isnt great, even when fully charged, but its not too difficult to aim slightly higher than your target so that it reaches them, and since its a sidescroller you cant see that far ahead of you anyway. You can upgrade to shoot up to 3 arrows at a time, so youre more likley to hit something and will do alot more damage.
The second skill is a grappling hook, it cant grab ahold of just anything though. So far it only works on wooden things, a cool feature though is that you can wedge wooden boxes into spikes in ceilings, and then use that wooden box to grapple and swing, something you may be doing quite alot as you progress.There is also a fire arrow upgrade, it can be used to light torches, since the level you find it on is VERY dark without them lit. It also does extra damage although it uses your energy
Wizard
The intro mentions fireballs, and how fireballs attract the ladies, but he cant do that, not yet atleast. Im not sure if it will be an unlockable skill in the future, the wizard has yet to learn any directly offensive skills, he is all about the physics in the game. His firsk skill is to grab hold and move almost any object that is affected by physics with magic. This is used to move boxes for climbing, move planks to span gaps, and move hanging platofrms. There are even a few instances where platofrms and boxes are hanging from a little cart like thing with wheels, you stand on the platform and move the cart accross to span gaps.
As breifly mentioned before, this is the character than can wedge objects into deadly spikes, to make them less deadly and help you pass them. You can wedge stuff into spikes on the floor as stepping stones, spikes on walls as ledges/ladders and spikes in the ceilings as a grappling location. The ones in the ceiling have to be wooden for that to work though, which brings us to his second skill – he can create objects out of thin air.
At first its only boxes, and only one at a time. You can level the skill up to do more than one at a time and later learn how to spawn planks. These objects are made of metal and gears though, so they cant be used for grappling. If you spawn them in the air above an enemy, it will often crush them, or atleast act as an obstacle they have to climb over. Later on you will learn a new skill to create floating platforms, you can put these just about anywhere and use them as a stepping stone, upgrading allows you to grapple from them and upgrading again allows you to set them on fire and use them offensively
Knight
The knight is big, fat and has a sword and sheild. He can bash objects about and break wooden planks that cover doorways with his sword. He can also jump on wooden planks covering holes to break them and apparently (only found it out later on when looking at the achievement list) he can kill some enemies by jumping on them. You may come across ropes holding some objects up (or down), the knight can cut these, often causing something to drop and clear the way by destroying whatever was there. Of course, he can block with his sheild and attack with the sword when it comes to enemys. Thats basically his primary skill, hit stuff until it breaks. Later there will be a fire sword upgrade, which does more damage and can light torches like the theifs fire bow. He can also unlock a hammer later on, this is a much stronger weapon, can break stone walls but you cannot use the sheild with it.
Another skill that is unlocked slightly into the game is the ability to pick up and throw small objects at enemies. At first, it didnt seem very good, but you can kill enemys just by swinging large rocks around, even on the hard difficulty, you can break stone walls by throwing the fist shaped rocks aswell.
Back to the game
So, after you play all three of the characters, they have all met in the center, around some glowy thing, i think its the trine, i wasnt actually following the story that much though, just enjoying the game. Anywho, now the game really starts. All three of the characters are conjoined into one, and you can transform between each one with the 1,2 and 3 keys. So now, you can start mixing and matching skills. Play styles may vary, but basically, the theif becomes the get around character. You use her to grapple and quickly progress through the level, if you come to an obstacle, its usually the Wizards job to sort it all out by moving objects around and creating objects to pass by. Some of these tasks can still be performed by the knight or theif if you prefer though. The theif can knock down some lighter objects witht he bow or grapple onto them and use her weight to pull them down, and the knight can just bash obstacles out of the way. When you come to enemies, its usually the knights turn to shine, you may have to switch to the theif to take out archers though. You could use the wizard to drop objects on enemies, although its slow and enemies are often fast. I find myself using the theif alot, with good use of the grappling hook and physics its possible to to fling yourself accross or over obstacles and puzzles in ways i dont really think you were supposed to.
Although they are all one now, they still have there own health and magic bars. Picking up potions to refil these seem to add a little to each character though. If one dies, you have to switch to another until you reach a checkpoint where they will come back with a percentage of life, the amount depends on difficulty, seems to be half in normal and a quater in hard. If you have just passed a checkpoint and one character gets killed you can go back and use it again. Even though you still have two characters after one dies, you will often quickly find that you really needed their skills for something, each character has their place and they are all needed to get through each level.
Later there will be swiming sections, not my favourite parts, everything is blurry and dark. Each character has their own breath meter, which only goes down if they are the active character, and the swimming sections take longer than one bar of breath, so you need to switch when one gets low to carry on. Nothing really happens under there and all you can really do is swim, so it all seems a bit pointless to me. note: didnt realise at first, the knight cant swim, he plummets to the bottom where he can walk because hes soo heavy. Later on you will probably find an item for infinite breath aswell, which makes the whole thing even more pointless.
Verdict so far?
So far, this is deffinetly an enjoyable little game, i do get the feeling nostalgia could be part of it though. There are some aspects of the game that deffinetly seem like a throwback to old sidescrolling platoformers from the 80s/90s, which i like, but maybe some younger or newer gamers wouldnt enjoy so much. They even start adding holes in walls that shoot fireballs every couple of seconds not far into the game, you can kill some enemies by jumping on them and the grappling hook seems like it could be a nod towards the 2D bionic commandos. Even though it has these retro gameplay mechanics, they managed to keep it modern with pretty good visuals, a cool physics and puzzle system and the hack n slash style combat.
Anywho, thats it for now. Ill probably add more to this as i play further, i should probably try to get some more pictures aswell, to break up the text!
They lived happily ever after
Thats how it ended. Spoiler you say? Not really. Theres a little “funny” scene during the ending, but apart from that, the story wasnt really needed. Nothing else to add really, game continued to be awesome. The last level was slightly different from the rest, it suddenly becomes a race for life where you have to climb upwards as lava follows behind you. Again, another classic gameplay feature from old games, but this time the physics add another layer to the challenge. A certain enemy following you has the ability to spawn objects like the wizard, but can also spawn massive balls with spikes on them. As you climb he will spawn things in akward positions, and you have to act fast, getting caught up by one obstacle usually ends up in a chain reaction of failing and falling.
Eventually you will reach the top, where you fight a few skeletons, do a bit of extra climbing and you are home free! It was a bit anticlimactic, but not enough to bring my view on the game down at all. Now you can go back and get all the experience and secret items you missed, your characters will still have all the items and upgrades you found along the way. Going back through old levels, you may find there were slightly different ways to get past obstacles with your new upgrades, items or simply the knowledge you gained on the way through.
Tags: Trine
