Trine

PC Game Review: Trine

Trine is an action-adventure, side-scrolling video game developed by Frozenbyte and published by SouthPeak Interactive.

After a series of events that cause a thief, a wizard, and a knight to come in contact with a mystical object known as the Trine, the three characters souls become bound to each other. The only way to remove the effect is by collecting three artifacts and defeating the monster that has mysteriously awoken the dead throughout the kingdom.

Trine plays like a modern re-imagining of the Blizzard SNES title The Lost Vikings. You have control over three different character types, the aforementioned Thief, Wizard, and Knight, who all bring their own strengths and weaknesses to the fight. The wizard uses his magic to create objects to reach otherwise inaccessible areas as well as telepathically move his own or other objects in the game. He has almost no offensive output, however. The thief uses a bow to attack enemies at range, and also has a grappling hook for swinging across great distances, Pitfall-style. In melee combat, she can get easily overwhelmed. The knight remedies this with his sword and shield combo, but fails at agility-based tasks like swimming.

Unlike The Lost Vikings, you are essentially playing one character who can shift into three classes. This is done on the fly, so you can quickly shoot down an archer with your thief, swap to your knight for clearing out the enemies charging in front of you, then create a box with your wizard to give you the height to reach the next ledge and escape the pursuing horde.

If you are looking for a story in your action game, Trine is not going to provide one for you. While there are numerous voice-overs (competently done) that advance your characters' story, it is hardly intriguing, and provides more of a means to an end rather than a gripping narrative. The game is full of puzzles that seem to require specific characters to pass, but since each character has his or her own health bar and can "die" and be unusable until the next checkpoint, there is usually a less obvious path that is specific for the classes you have left alive. This allows a bit of freedom in how you get through obstacles, but I found that I rarely used my knight for puzzle solving and only pulled him out during big fights because of this. The combat is decent - consisting usually of you spamming the attack button or charging your bow to shoot at range - but you have the tendency to get in a lot of "tie" hits, where both you and the enemy are damaged. But since the enemies can at certain areas constantly respawn, you end up dying pretty easily.

The graphics are aesthetically good, with nice lighting, shadow and fire effects. My machine slowed down a bit when I reached fire-heavy areas like lava pits, though this might not be the games fault. The color palette ranged from vibrant greens and purples in forest areas to dusty browns and grays in underground levels. The animations would have flowed well and seemed authentic if not for a bit of chugging during the more intense combat sequences. The game has a good physics engine, realistically giving appropriate weight to all movable objects. The level design at the beginning was fun and interesting, but ideas were reused so often that I could predict where the other paths were going to be. For those who enjoy level design built around jumping over lava (and poisonous, acidic, or pointy equivalents) this is the game for you. And the further into the game you get, the more often the designers fell back on this gaming stalwart. This makes re-playability a mixed bag. While the game is simple enough that numerous playthroughs are possible, there isn't much else to do beside completing the fairly standard set of achievements or trying to navigate an already repeating set of obstacles once again on a harder difficulty level.

I have yet to try the multiplayer. If I do and it significantly changes my opinion on the game, I'll write an addendum to this review.

Overall, the eight to ten hours of gameplay don't justify the $19.99 price tag, but if you can find it on sale like I did, it's more than a competent enough game.