Trine: Busygamer Rating 5 of 5

First Glance:
Platform your way through a pretty, 2D classic fantasy world, solving puzzles and alternating between three characters at will as you go. Find shiny green experience vials, fight undead, and conjure objects.

The Short Story:
The Trine is a mysterious artifact that has bound together the souls of three characters- a wizard, a thief, and a knight. The game follows the three on their quest to be free of the Trine and each other. Each character has unique abilities, and you can switch between them anytime you want. Puzzles that can be solved multiple ways make the game more creative, and the system of checkpoints and levels means that their isn’t a lot of redundant playing when you die, and its easy to play in short sessions. Gameplay is reminiscent of Tomb Raider at times, especially when playing as the thief, and sometimes echoes Prince of Persia, but with a fantasy flavoring to the world.

The Score:
The game play is fun, and since there isn’t a single “right way??? to solve each puzzle, the game doesn’t get repetitive as puzzles sometimes can. It’s easy on the eyes, and the music and sound is also pleasant. The game is split into levels, and within each level are several checkpoints, which resurrect any dead characters and are the restart points in case you get your entire party killed. This keeps boring repeat play to a minimum – you don’t have to replay through a lot when you die, and what you do repeat, you don’t have to play exactly the same. The game is saved every time you complete a level, so you can easily play one level at a time if you wish. You can easily put it down for a week and pick it right back up – the nature of the game allows you to continue to enjoy it even if you do totally forget about one of your abilities. Trine scores a 5 on the Busy Gamer scale because it is certainly possible to enjoy and progress through at less than an hour spent each day. However, it is certainly enjoyable enough to play in longer sessions as well.

Trine Review by Rika Stead - Photo Jim Brown

Body of Review:
Progressing through Trine is dependent on the use of the three unique characters. You can switch between the three at will, and the feel of the game will depend on how you use these characters.

The wizard can conjure items such as boxes and planks- which follow the laws of gravity thanks to the life-like physics of the game. He can also magically move those objects around. He has no combat abilities, but in a pinch he can levitate an object and drop it on enemies.

The thief has a bow for combat and a grappling hook for climbing. She eventually gains abilities such as shooting multiple arrows and fire arrow, which can be sued both in combat and to light torches in certain levels. Her arrows can be aimed in any direction and fall when they reach the limits of their momentum.

The knight’s contribution is pretty much limited to combat. He can hack at enemies, throw items about, and block with his shield. His block is also occasionally useful for getting past swinging spike balls. He also contributes the occasional not-so-bright remark.

You navigate through the game using any combination of the character abilities you can think up. Many of the puzzles can be solved different ways, and you have the choice between overcoming a certain obstacle solely with a single player, or having them work together. For example, you can have the wizard conjure boxes and impale them on the spikes lining the walls of a chamber and then switch to the thief, who will climb up the boxes until she can reach a platform with her grappling hook and leap free.

One of the best features of Trine is the use of physics. Everything in the game will behave very much like a real object as it is moved around, hit, or thrown through the air. Also, any object you can interact with can be interacted with in any way. So instead of having a platform that drops when weight is put on it, or spikes that cause damage, you have a moving platform that can be propped up by the wizard’s conjured box and then have a plank rested on top of it and spikes that you can impale crates on and then safely climb on. But be careful- if you climb on your tower of plank on platform on box and you step off center, it may unbalance and topple the whole thing.

Trine for PC by Southpeak Interactive

There is no “linear frustration??? with Trine- that irritating feeling when you know you need the key to open the gate, but you just can’t find the key. If the obvious plan doesn’t work for some reason, like if the character best suited to the puzzle is dead, you just find a different solution.

Experience is gained by finding green vials that are sometimes easily accessible freebies, and sometimes totally hidden from view. Some enemies also release experience upon death. Health and energy vials are also placed through out, although I found the energy vials to be more or less useless, as my characters were very rarely out of energy.

The characters improve through a skill point system as well as through abilities that can be found in chests. The skill point system is a bit lack luster, there really aren’t too many earth shattering decisions to make, its’ more of a system for doling out advancements at a restrained pace. The so-so skill system really affects the game so little though that it seems almost a waste of resources to have put it in. Finding the prizes in the chests is much more captivating than assigning skill points with few choices.

The strength of Trine is that its just easy to enjoy. Its a fun game, and it doesn’t put too many pains in the butt in the way of your enjoying it. It really has no nagging annoyances. The game play is entertaining and neither too easy or too hard, the graphics are pretty, and its not exactly like anything else you’ve played. Its a good game to get some gaming in in between work, obligations, and taking care of the kids if you’re the sort of gamer who likes to play but doesn’t have much time, but its also a good game to play to break up the seriousness of long MMO sessions and competitive gaming if you’re that kind of gamer as well.