Trine 2 review
Ah, physics puzzles. Don’t you just love balancing things, weighing down things, buoying up things and building teetering towers of things? Rules, order, logic; marvellous – but what’s this? Physics and magic in the same game? What an intriguing dichotomy! Have developers Frozenbyte created a deeply illuminating treatise that will force us to rethink the established norms of digital metaphysics?
Er, no. That’s just me getting stupendously carried away. Trine 2 might be ‘just’ a puzzle platformer, but it’s a thoroughly good one. The formula behind Trine, one of the indie breakout hits of 2009, was so neat that it’s unsurprising that a sequel has come along. You play as three characters in a typical fairytale world: Pontius the knight, Amadeus the wizard and Zoya the thief. Each has special abilities that you’ll need to progress through the side-scrolling levels.
Pontius is good at smashing rocky obstacles or goblin skulls, and his shield protects him from fire and missiles, whilst Amadeus can levitate objects and conjure up boxes and planks to bridge gaps. Using her grappling hook, Zoya can swing through levels like a medieval Spiderman and shoot down distant objects with her bow. When combined with environments full of swinging beams, spike traps, air jets and the occasional onslaught of green skin goons, the concept shines.
There’s not an enormous amount of challenge once the mechanics become second nature, but the fun factor never disappears. It’s one of those games where the elegance and simplicity of the core gameplay is so satisfying, that it doesn’t need to have more and more features piled on top of it to stop it becoming stale. It remains fresh and enjoyable throughout.
Part of this is down to the design of the puzzles. In some areas a certain character will be required to pass through, such as when a stone wall needs to be busted down by Pontius’ hammer, but in many cases they can be tackled through a variety of means. Instead of providing individual problems to be solved, the game presents a series of obstacles and lets the player get on with passing by them as they see fit.
I’m a fan of Zoya – flipping round and round wooden platforms like a trapeze artist never gets old – but those who enjoy wizardry can mess about building towers and bridges using Amadeus’ powers. In the pursuit of one achievement, which challenges you to finish a level using one character, I found that an earlier area, filled with bits of piping intended for Amadeus’ to fashion into a jet of air, can be bypassed by clever use of Zoya’s grapple. At another point, a secret chest lay off the main path across a fiery chasm. Naturally, I built a bridge by conjuring two planks and balancing them with a box at each end, a bridge that was collapsing even as I jumped across. It wasn’t elegant and might not have been what the designers intended, but it worked.
There’s a small but well-judged amount of customisation for each character as well. All three have skill trees; Zoya can add fire and ice effects to her arrows, Pontius gains the power to throw his hammer to bash out of reach walls and Amadeus can conjure two, then three, then four objects at once. Unless you go hunting for all the experience hidden through each level – think Mario’s coins or Sonic’s rings – then you won’t have all the abilities by the end of the game, which makes you focus on your favourite characters.
I was slightly disappointed that the magic items from the first Trine have been removed, but it’s hardly a great loss. Trine 2 is still very similar in a lot of ways, providing more of the same gameplay and keeping the same base skills of each of the characters. The few gameplay changes that are present are welcome tweaks and fixes. Instead of demanding that the player draws a near-perfect square with Amadeus before conjuring a box, Trine 2 is much friendlier, allowing for much quicker mouse movements to summon useful objects. Zoya’s grapple swing is also vastly improved as she gains momentum far quicker, keeping the flow of the action going where Trine slowed it down with ponderous back-and-forth and back-and-forth movements.
The best upgrade is in the presentation. Trine 2 is an extraordinarily pretty game, where the balance of 2D platforming and 3D artwork is perfectly struck, and where detail flourishes in the background and foreground of every screenshot. I’m not normally one to pick out a game’s lighting effects, but Frozenbyte have done a brilliant job in casting all sorts of shades of colour on their varied worlds, from dense forests to eerie witches’ lairs, to gorgeous underwater moments. In one level, a gentle, sunlit area is suddenly transformed by an onrushing storm with a fantastic graphical flourish not normally seen in a title of this standing.
Everything else is as you’d expect for a twee fantasy adventure. The story is minimal – start quest, beat baddies, save princess, bedtime – but what fairytales aren’t? Besides, when you’ve got good voice work for the three characters, an actor who can do a good goblin cackle and a narrator who sounds like the Grandad from the Werther’s Original ads, you hardly need the plot of Macbeth.
When the eternally-fresh gameplay and excellent presentation come together, along with the extra excitement of local and online co-op multiplayer, concluding this review is extremely easy. Trine 2 is a very, very pleasant place to spend a few hours. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to submit my thesis on magiphysical dynamics for peer review in Nature.
-
https://incomedisposed.wordpress.com/ Yann Best
