wassup!?
The combat controls give you a lot of flexibility.
The combat controls give you a lot of flexibility.
Trine is primarily a methodically paced puzzle game, so it's high praise to say the game's combat is also a lot of fun. The thief is armed with a bow and arrow, and you can vary the tension on the bowstring when you shoot it, letting you pull fancy moves like arcing arrows over obstacles and through narrow openings when you get a feel for it. The warrior has a shield he can hold up to protect himself from any angle, and he can also pick up and throw large objects. What really makes the combat work is the aiming system, which lets you aim the thief's bow and the warrior's shield and thrown objects in an arc around the character with a great degree of precision, using either the mouse or a gamepad's right analog stick. This frees you up to do things like raising your shield over the warrior's head to protect yourself from a rain of debris, or raining a shower of arrows down over a high wall with a carefully aimed bow shot.Trine would still be great if you were limited to the characters' basic set of abilities, but there's a thin layer of RPG-style character progression on top of the core action that lets you customize the gameplay to a small extent. Mainly, there's a level-up system that lets you upgrade each character's three core abilities with a sort of basic talent tree setup. You only gain experience points from certain enemies; most of it is embodied in little green bottles that are scattered in the hardest-to-reach places in each level, so there's a direct tangible benefit to your characters that results from exploring every nook and cranny. By the same token, you can find loot in treasure chests hidden around each level that buffs a given character's stats and gives them some bonus survival options. You can trade your gear around between characters to get the most benefit, and by the latter half of the game your characters will start to become way more powerful than they were at the beginning.There's not much I can say about Trine's visuals that you can't see for yourself in videos, but this is seriously a fantastic-looking game. The artists use the fixed camera angle to great effect here, giving the levels a real feeling of depth with expansive backgrounds and extremely close-up foreground objects that make you forget you're only operating in a 2D space. There's also an expert use of color palette, set pieces, and environmental effects in every level that combine to establish a great sense of cohesive atmosphere. The lavish graphics don't come at a great hardware expense, either; even my modestly equipped PC kept the game locked at a fully playable 60 frames per second at high settings.
Nobody will call this an ugly game.
Nobody will call this an ugly game.
You can also play Trine with a local drop-in cooperative mode that lets two or three people control all the characters at once. Three players makes the action a little too busy and demanding, and removes the ability to swap between characters entirely, which makes some of the obstacles a pain to get by. Two-player co-op feels like the sweet spot, since either player can still swap to the third character at any time to maintain that puzzle-solving flexibility that makes the single-player so much fun. And two characters can pull off some tricks you can't do in single-player, like the wizard giving the thief a levitated ride across a bottomless pit on a conjured platform. Still, I had the most fun playing solo, when I had complete control over all the characters' abilities and could use them in concert to do things in really creative ways.It's worth noting that Trine is currently only available on the PC at a $30 price, while a PlayStation Network version is slated for release in the near future for only $20. Since I'd recommend playing the game with a gamepad over the mouse and keyboard anyway, I'd advise those with a PS3 to wait a bit and see how this less expensive option turns out. (An Xbox Live Arcade version is also on the way from Atlus, but that release is said to be several months away.) Whatever platform you play games on, though, Trine's got the gameplay and the looks to make it well worth your time and money.