A surprisingly good game all around, even if it is a little too short.
Which was a whopping five hours, but still...for a platformer to hold my attention even for a half hour is surprising enough. Regardless Trine is a gem in the rough, the art style and graphical representation is beautiful.
I can't think of a single gripe about the graphics or the art behind them. The story is your typical "go and save the world from ambiguous evil" tripe. Thankfully thats made up for by the representation of the Trine world, as well as the gameplay itself.
The gameplay is your typical platform style, with terrain puzzles aplenty. It does have a few novel approaches though, all three of the characters abilities are at least moderately useful. Some more so than others, I found the Knight later on in the game to be overshadowed even in his own area(that being DPS).
The mage is probably the all-around most useful of the three. What I found most surprising about Trine was its multiple ways of solving any given situation. I remember in a lot of older platform games, there was one right way to go about a puzzle in the game and nine hundred and ninety nine wrong ways.
In Trine fortunately theres several ways to solve any given problem, especially later in the game where getting past a area is heavily left up to player discretion. And there are not any real hints on direction.
One of the strikes against Trine I guess is the fact that I was rather annoyed with the constantly respawning undead in certain parts. Trine's big area of expertise isn't in-game combat anyway so I don't understand why the developers felt it necessary to spawn 15+ skeletons in a single area.
It just becomes a big annoyance when you want to move on, but you have to spend a minute or so mopping up annoying mobs.
I know a lot of people are iffy about the price of the game versus its length. Some argue that the game needs to be dropped in price, others argue that it should have been lengthened to match the $20 price tag at release.
To be honest, the style of game that it is I can't see playing Trine for more than 5-8 hours in a playthrough. Platformers are not supposed to be epic RPGs with hundreds of hours of game-time, purely because most people would probably get bored with platforming before even half that time was up.
As for the price problem, from what I hear you can get Trine for $10 off Steam and a few other places now.
Regardless, for anybody thats even remotely interested in platform games or action adventure picking up a copy of Trine couldn't hurt.