Trine Review!

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Trine is a game full of character and beautiful visuals, mixed with a rich musical accompaniment and solid but flexible game play.

The story of Trine is the classic tale of a foul evil besetting the land, bringing with it darkness and decay, and among other things the undead. Three heroes are bound together by a strange artefact called the trine, and on their way to un-entwining their souls they must also put the dead to rest and cure the land.


The dead have risen and it is up to you to put them to rest.

Their quest takes them on a journey across 15 beautifully crafted levels, and while the action takes place on a 2D plane, the world is fully rendered in 3D giving the game a wonderful depth and life that could never be achieved with 2D effects. The different locations are diverse, ranging from fantastical forests and dark dungeons to lava filled castles! The level design itself is very linear, you have a path you must follow with problems to solve on the way, but there are secrets hidden in hard to reach places around the level which provide a nice challenge on the way through. Some multiple path options might have added some more replayability to the game.


The levels in Trine are literally beautiful.

Trine is a side scrolling physics puzzle/platformer, and I think its safe to say that description covers it. Using the PhysX engine its puzzles are robust and move just as you would expect them to. I have come to expect physics glitches from games that make it a selling point, but I was pleasantly surprised with Trine. It also felt controlled and realistic, rather than exaggerrated and uncontrollable when moving objects.

The puzzle aspect of the game was both fun and interesting but as with many games of its type it was not without issues. Each character has a different set of abilities that you find throughout the game: the wizard is able to create objects to form bridges and platforms; the warrior is good at breaking things, picking up objects as well as throwing them; and the thief has a grappling hook enabling her to swing up to ledges. With each character having different skills this allows problems to be solved in a multitude of ways, which sounds good, but I found myself solving the majority of them with the thief, occasionally using the wizard to bridge some spikes or wedge a moving platform. While I would encourage the use of all the powers/characters I really must make the observation that the thief is the most useful: she is able to easily defeat most enemies while also being able to access most places using the grapple. The warrior is pretty much useless in the puzzle sections, which makes some sense since he is the big, dumb brute, but with the combat feeling a little lack lustre and the thief becoming as good as, if not better than the warrior at killing things after a few levels, he does feel surplus to requirement.


The Thief's grapple is one of the most useful tools in the game.

As I mentioned previously the combat feels a little lack lustre, as it's very methodical, you block or avoid the enemy and then hit them till they die (again). The good points are that it looks fantastic, the warrior’s animations are really nice, and it’s very intuitive: left button to attack, right button to block and you attack in a direction depending which side of the character the mouse cursor is on. Despite this after the novelty had worn off it just became dull and repetitive, and I'd sooner have done without it.

Trine is a beautiful little game graced with amazing visuals and audio, as well as great level design and fun puzzles. However it is afflicted with pointless, repetitive combat that only serves to slow you down. The warrior character also feels useless when compared with the Thief or the Wizard. The game is a nice length, 15 levels is enough to sustain you through a few casual play sessions. Though an inability to save your progress part way through a level is a mild annoyance, meaning you have to finish a level or next time you come back you have to start from the start of the level you were on.

Overall it is a good game that suffers from a few minor flaws, but nothing game destroying. If you enjoy good looking and sounding games or are after something to fill a couple of hours over a few days, then Trine is your thing.

 

The game looks pretty interesting, thanks for the review. Thought it sounded familiar, then remembered why when I saw Yahtzee's review of it again (it's in the second half of the vid). Kind of missed the fact that it was available on the PC too from that review.

By the way Dave, you might want to resize that second image, it ruins the layout of the page.