It’s A 3-Way…An All Tolkien 3-Way! – Review of Trine
Trine
Developed by: Frozenbyte Studios
For: Playstation Network
It becomes readily apparent to most that I am a lover of the platforming genre. Some of my personal favorites over the past few years have skewed to that genre, particularly Ratchet and Clank and New Super Mario Bros.. Trine is a game I’ve been eagerly waiting for to come on the PSN…and I wish I waited a little bit longer for it.
Before we get to that, let’s get right to the story. Trine is about a nimble thief, a frail and wisecracking wizard and a portly knight who touch the item called the Trine in the beginning of the game. The item is, of course, of magical properties and fuses the souls of the three into one.
This is where the crux of the game is drawn from: You can switch between all three characters at will to traverse through all of the areas. For example, you can use the grappling hook on the thief to scale to the top of a platform. Or, you can use the wizard to create boxes to jump on so you can step up to the top. Or, you can use the knight to push a boulder onto a see-saw to prop up the seesaw to reach the top.
All three have various strengths and weaknesses. The thief can only shoot arrows, but she easily has the best jump height and is the only person who can use the grappling hook. The knight is the slowest, but has a big shield to deflect attacks and environmental hazards. The wizard doesn’t really fight at all, but he’s important to solve some of the physics based puzzles and can set up makeshift attacks with his box spells.
You have to use all three characters to go through the environments, which sets up some excellent platforming levels. Each character has been very well implemented in each environment, so if one person dies there is another way to solve the puzzle of getting out of the area. In the playthrough, it doesn’t seem like one character is preferred over another, which really comes to show the excellent balance the game has.
The environments themselves are colorful, lush and have a lavish storybook quality to them. The enemies have a stopmotion like quality to them that adds a certain charm to the game. It’s very easy to be lost in the little details of the game, especially when they are this beautiful to look at.
Also, the way the story folds out is particularly well done. Adding the storybook quality is the narration that happens before, during and after the levels, which really helps envelop you into the game. The often humorous quips from the narrator inject even more charm into the already humorous story.
There is a lot to love about Trine…which is why it’s painful to say that it falters on one key component: control. The game uses a rather loose physics engine that has items and girders falling realistically (much like LittleBigPlanet), but the characters don’t react fast enough to the action.
This is especially true for the thief, who is supposed to be the most agile of the characters. Her speed and jumping is too spastic to get a good grip on. On top of that, her grappling hook is incredibly touchy. Sometimes, you’ll plan out a strategy and see a wooden plank and think “Hey, I can grapple off of that!” only to find out your wrong and fall into a bed of spikes, thus killing your thief and jinxing you until the next checkpoint.
On top of that, the wizard’s spell cursor moves a little too slow for it to be useful in a flash. This becomes incredibly annoying later on, because you need to be quick about summoning planks and boxes. This adds another unnecessary difficulty spike to a game that gets difficult later on, which may lead to some getting the PC version of the game instead.
There are a lot of pluses with Trine that should be celebrated. It’s enchanting score, graphics and story makes the game a joy to watch with its smart script and narration. Unfortunately, the control hampers the expereince that PC gamers don’t have to experience. If you have a decent PC that can run Trine, play it on that. Otherwise, $20 for the PSN version is a good bargain for the $30 PC version that you’ll want to try.
Brad Wiswall
www.twitter.com/gamakarmica
Review
Pros Cons - A hilarious, enchanting story
- Charming, colorful visuals
- Beautiful score and sound- Physics can be problematic
- The wizard's spellcasting is too slow
- The thief is too spastic, hard to control
Rating
