Review:
Trine (for the PC)

Trine is not your average fantasy role playing game. From a distribution perspective, it dares to be different, going for an online release on Steam or a number of other sites instead of going retail. Without the costs of publication, we were given the opportunity to have a quality gaming experience at a budget price. But isn’t that what download distribution is all about?

Trine is a role playing platformer, similar in gameplay to Castlevania. You control all of three characters: the Diablo classes of warrior, rogue and mage. As the story goes, their souls get fused together by some crystal, and only one can exist at a time. This means you get to switch between them at will to overcome obstacles and fight back the undead swarm threatening the kingdom.

The story is told mainly through a British narrator as each level loads. He tells their story in a quality British way, and it works about as well as any British narration ever has. Which is, of course, very well indeed. It’s a charming story and it should make you smile.

The gameplay can be a lot of fun. Trine introduces a powerful physics engine that lets us do things that we’ve been conditioned to think we couldn’t do for a long time. Some solutions to puzzles make you feel like you’re smarter than the game, whether or not this is true we’ll never know. The wizard can make boxes and platforms at will, as well as use his telekinesis on pretty much anything, allowing for some clever ways to get past obstacles. Teaming that with the rogue's powerful grappling hook sometimes it seems like there are no obstacles you can’t cross.

There are frustrations, however. The wizard’s telekinesis can be hard to control at times with just about anything. Rotating objects so that they fit in certain places is much harder than it should be, and not being able to move while in telekinesis is annoying, but not as annoying as the slight movement you experience when rotating objects that can lead to your wizard’s death.

The rogue's grappling hook can also take some getting used to, and you’ll miss a lot of jumps trying to do something that should be easy as cake. As for the warrior, he is by far the least fun character to play, but when you get the hammer later on, it can be a joy to send enemies flying across the level.

The difficulty in the game is fairly consistent. There are a lot of puzzles to get past, as one would expect from such a game, but none of them stumped me for very long, and I’m terrible at puzzles so if you’re reading this you probably shouldn’t have any problems.

Not everything is a walk in the park, however. As is often the case with almost any game, the designers probably looked at it and realized it was missing something important. It needed a terrible annoyance, something that would appear every once in a while for no other reason than to piss the player off.

In this game, that thing is bats.

They swarm you, almost impossible to kill, doing more damage than the skeletons and giant bosses ever did. Often times as the warrior I’d be swinging my mighty ax when a swarm of bats would appear. The hammer is useless against bats, and as I move to switch weapons (an act that takes second) BAM my warrior was dead. Why make bats so powerful? And tiny and impossible to kill? Why make them so malicious? I was having fun killing skeletons and then...BATS.

There is multiplayer in the PC version of the game, but it requires a second keyboard and mouse for every player. If you happen to not have that many extra keyboards and mice, then you can forget it. It would have been nice to see some online multiplayer in the game, and that would have more than likely increased replayability by a whole lot.

The game is the perfect example of what a downloadable game should be. It’s shorter and cheaper than the average game, but I found it to be the perfect length. By the end I was growing tired of the gameplay and I felt I was ready to move on. It presented me with an entertaining gameplay experience that really didn’t overstay its welcome. If you’re looking for something new and different then perhaps you should check it out. It’ll make you smile, and you’ll like it as long as your expectations aren’t too high.