I backed it on Kickstarter, and own on Steam. Seriously , this piece of software has the worst user interface ever , unresponsive commands and animations, unclear gameplay... and all of that after waiting over 7 years ??? Do yourself a favor : save your time and money and move on to some other worthy game.
After completing with 3 stars the first 15 missions, I can say that this tactical / adventure / puzzle game is fun and quite challenging , brain required :)
twicking the random generator at character creation was really unasked for. There is almost no total roll above 80 , don't even hope above 90 ... lame
Trine 2 is gorgeous, brillant, fun, and the difficulty is better balanced than Trine 1. An excellent game.
The mix between tower defence and FPS is fun and well-balanced. And playing a canadian lumberjack in the 18th century, fighting werwolves ? That's the best setting i've seen for ages.
The Good : Nice Art direction, great soundtrack, calculatory chess-like gameplay The Bad : Rules are VERY counter-intuitive : the player and the AI each move a piece in turn. So if you have 6 characters on the battlefield and the AI have 2 remaining, it means that each of the AI pieces will move 3 times when each of your low-level pieces move once. In a chess game , however, pieces have 1atk and 1 hp ,so you have to be carefull with moves. In this game, the remaining pieces could very well decimate your troops without much retaliation, because your troops may have been too weakened to be of consequence. So, the right strategy to avoid injuries is to weaken enemy pieces without killing them (in order to avoid hastening the turns of his still healthy units) and only kill them when they have all been weakened (with a few exceptions like trasher unit) This result in a very tedious game that punish blitz tactics. The rest of the game plays like a "choose your own adventure books " with the same pitfall : you have to make decisions without informations on why, how, when or ifs. And the consequence feel as arbitrary as having a piano falling from the sky , killing one of your character for the DM's fun. The battle mechanic is quite deterministic whereas the story mechanic is completely arbitrary. The game feels schizophrenic. And then you spend a 3rd of your gaming time watching a caravan move in 2D. Not my idea of fun. All-in-all, a disappointment from an over-hyped game.
