Trine 2 Review

A little over a month ago, on this blog I reviewed a little game called Trine. It was a fun platforming game infused with beautiful scenery and music to fit the atmosphere. Now, it’s time to take a look at the sequel of the said game. Will Trine 2 match or even improve that what was Trine?

Trine 2 starts off a few years after where Trine stopped.  This time, however, instead of being locked up inside the Trine, our heroes are being lead by it, in a way. They come across a flower that asks them to help find her sister.  Later, it’s revealed that the flower was actually a princess called Isabel who wants you to find her sister, princess Rosabel. Thus the hunt for the princess sisters begins – saving them is your quest in this game. Naturally, there are some plot twists to the story which shall remain unrevealed.

The purple just never gets old.

The first thing you notice when you start up the game is how AMOOZING it looks.  They upped the graphics from the first game and somehow made everything seem even more vivid. There is a lot more interaction with the background, things popping up, camera zooming in, lots of wowiezowies. They also added new objects to work with such as tree saplings you need to water, leaves that you can jump on but that give in when weight is applied and jellowy mushroomies that go bouncy bounce.

The game handles pretty much exactly the same as the first one. You still control the same characters: Zoya the thief, Amadeus the Harry Potter and Pontius the obese knight. They added a bunch of new skills for each character and along with that changed the whole leveling up system at the same time. The characters now have a shared pool of experience, so you can only pretty much assign a skill point to one character at a time per each level.

Orc Smash!

The game itself works pretty much exactly like its predecessor. Controls are easy and fluent, the characters respond nicely and the main skills of the characters have remained the same. It’s really easy to just jump in a start playing the game which is always a nice thing.

On my Trine review, I hinted that the game could have been more challenging. To fix that, the developers added a Hardcore mode, which basically means your characters are revived only once at each checkpoint. Turning this mode off will make being revived much simpler as you can do so an infinite amount of times.

They also added a multiplayer feature to the game, which is something I unfortunately didn’t get to try out before writing this review. Based on a few Youtube videos it seems that the multiplayer is like singleplayer, only with two players (who both have all three characters at their disposal) who are pretty much ghosts to each other. Meaning they can’t hit each other or bump into one another.

Game of Thrones!

Sadly, every silver lining has a dark cloud inside of it. Out of the new things and improvements they added to Trine 2 in comparison to Trine – most don’t really impress me. Let’s begin with the new camera angle! As I mentioned earlier, the game is a lot more detailed than Trine. I think it’s because of the detail that the developers decided to zoom the camera in a lot when compared to the original Trine. This limits your view of the surroundings drastically. Nothing is more annoying than getting shot by a bad guy – one you can’t even see.

The extended skills seem unnecessary to me. I was able to beat the game using only the same basic skills that were available already in Trine. I couldn’t find any use for the invisibility skill on the thief or the frozen shield skill for the knight. I feel like the only reason they decided to go this way was to power down the insanely awesome thief and add a few gadgets for the sake of achievements. I didn’t unlock all of the skills. About halfway through the game I was struggling to even pick them as none of the available ones seemed either useful or interesting.

Yes, you need to enter that mouth.

Battles are really repetitive. It seems that every time you face a monster you’re fighting the exact same fight over and over again. Trine 2 has even less monster variety than Trine. There are some boss battle kind of enemies again as there were in Trine, but fighting the same “boss” over and over again is still boring.

If you liked Trine you’re most likely gonna like Trine 2 as well. If you’re hoping Trine 2 to be hugely improved over Trine you’re most likely going be disappointed. As a summary, Trine 2 is basically a graphically improved expansion to Trine with some additions that feel somewhat like a forced effort. Unlike Trine, I didn’t 100% Trine 2 and probably never will. It just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

(Note: The screenshots are taken from Steam.)

Trine Review

Indie games have become rapidly popular thanks to their low price, simple game mechanics and easy access through a little something called Steam. Trine (2009) is the third release in this genre by a Finnish gaming company called Frozenbyte. Their first game Shadowgrounds (2005) and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor (2007) received a fairly good reception despite their difficulty and repetitive nature. Let’s see how Trine fairs, hmm?

You’re a wizard, Harry! And a thief…and also a knight. Trine is a puzzling platforming game where you control three characters. These three heroes happened to touch a magical doohickey called Trine at the same time which caused all souls to be bound to it. Trine is a nasty lil’ thing and will only let one of the characters out to play while trapping the other two inside.

The full cast of the game.

The game is set in an old ruined kingdom far far away that fell to shit after its king died. Lacking a proper ruler, the kingdom’s local magic started slowly turning to the dark side and began bringing the dead back to life driving the land’s inhabitants away from the realm. You must fix this! To do this, you must avoid many gaps and spikes, kill even more skeletons and solve a few less puzzles than you had to kill skeletons.

The controls are pretty simple. You have your basic AWSD for moving your characters around as well as a skill on both of the mouse buttons. Numbers 1-3 switch your characters around. The thief, Zoya, can shoot her arrows and use a grappling hook on wooden surfaces. The knight, Pontius, can swing a sword, a mallet and block with his shield aaand the wizard, Amadeus, can make cute little boxes, triangles and planks as well as levitate various objects in the game. All the characters handle great and are easy to use for their designated tasks.

The scenery in the game is just beautiful. The outdoor levels are filled with many green, purple and red shiny things along with mushrooms and trees and other classical fantasy elements. There are also dungeon and castle levels, which are mostly filled with rocks, spikes and lava. Very appropriate. The gameplay between the level types stays pretty much the same throughout the game, though some of the enemies and obstacles vary.

Skeletons will fuck you up, even in mushroom kingdom.

The music ties the atmosphere together. Lovely, calming and slightly mystical music makes you wish you were in a magic mushroom forest fighting skeletons and struggling to get by with three separate bodies at your disposal. While that image may not be the healthiest one out there, it goes along nicely with the game.

One of downsides to the game, in my opinion is its repetitiveness. While the level scenery does vary, you can’t help but think you’re doing the same things over and over again. The enemies have very little variety besides how many hits they take throughout the game, excluding a few boss-like monsters.

I also wish there was a bit more to the plot. The narrator had a nice Gandalfy swag going for him during the cutscenes and loading screens, but still, most of what he said didn’t really grab my attention. Then again, this is a platforming game. There’s only so much of a plot you can include to your quest to make it up and to the right.

His breath must smell wonderful.

While I think it’s great that so many of the levels could be passed with almost any character you wanted, it kinda made the characters less equal. Why would you build a tower of boxes when you can just grapple your way up? Why would you want to risk getting hit at close range when you can just shoot the enemy from a safe distance? Yeah, you got it. The thief is simply the best character to use in the game while the wizard is close to being useless. I found myself using the wizard only for making a triangle for the thief to grapple to. The warrior was only used when the thief was close to death or dead and I had to break some bones of my enemies.

All things considered, Trine is a short but fun game. It took me about six hours to beat on the hard difficulty - on my first playthrough, so don’t expect a Donkey Kong Country kind of experience in platforming. I didn’t notice any difference between hard and very hard difficulty levels either. STILL, I’d say this is a nice casual game for anyone who likes the genre. It looks, sounds and plays amazing and it’s a cheap and great choice for speedrunning, should you be into that sorta thing.