Posted on: November 27, 2016

dimenovelwriter
Games: 96 Reviews: 5
Not good. Bad.
I tried to like Trine, but in the end it's an average game with clunky controls, a very problematic depth of field, and poor co-op implementation. Even the idea of swapping out characters to inherit a different set of skills ends up being pointless in the end. The controls are horrible. You can re-map and try to work around them, but in the end you really have to be playing on keyboard and mouse - difficult if you're playing local co-op. Even if you do use a keyboard, the response time feels lazy. Characters stop running a few hundred milliseconds after you stop, or jump just after you press JUMP. Maybe it's not a literal delay, but there's just something "off" about the physics. Combine bad physics with "3d" 2d platforming, and it's maddening. You can never tell where on the plane you are. Are you behind that fallen log or about to trip over it? You'll never know until you try it. Mix in some combat and you have a pretty miserable experience; the combat is no longer fun because you keep falling into a hole that you can't see, and then you die. For added frustration, try any of this with local co-op. The screen can't contain both characters, so you both end up crippled because one of you can't get over a rock and the other is trying to run ahead. It's so frustrating, especially since far lesser games implement a simple zoom-out camera function to deal with the same problem. And finally there's the one hook that Trine had going for it: the ability to quick-change your character in order to play a different set of skills. I still like this idea and I hope some other game tries some variation of it, but in practice it's a gimmick. Why bother switching characters? why not just let me earn the skill? It's not like I ever have to do a fast-change of character in mid-air or anything exciting like that. It's a mystery that there have been THREE of these games, but I do not recommend Trine or Trine 2 (haven't tried 3).
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