Trine 2's that rare game where its fights actually sound like fairy tale combat: heavy, chaotic and strangely good-natured.Īfter a bit of experimentation, I realise I still have a shot at this, though. (Trine 2 is that kind of game.) There's a problem, though: the hatch is glitchy and has gotten itself stuck, and the water bubble is now facing the wrong way and twitching around. I'm meant to be able to pull a hatch open in order to shoot an arrow at a water bubble that's lurking inside, causing the water to trickle down onto a sapling, which will then grow into a beanstalk allowing me to progress. We're still in the castle level, but this time the game's broken: properly broken. It's a proper gaming memory, in other words.Įxhibit B is a bit weirder. It's brilliant and funny and weirdly perfect - and yet it's all unscripted, and it never happens this way again on subsequent play-throughs. As I bound away, I can hear the mechanism chewing up my would-be attacker. Not on this occasion anyway, because the huge red guy trips and falls into the chuntering gears that are busy making those annoying platforms spin around, and they just happen to catch in the right places for me to get across. I'm going to need to time this just right - and time it just right even as I'm busy taking fiery blows to the back of my head.Įxcept I don't need to worry.
#Trine 2 rating series
Not only is this horrible giant gaining on me, but I can see a series of rotating platforms grinding away over a pit of spikes that I'm meant to be able to navigate. My thief and knight are both dead until I reach the next checkpoint, so I'm down to just my wizard, who can summon a decent plank, but is absolutely useless in a fight.īehind me, things look bad. A bit better, at least.Įxhibit A: I'm on the balmy shores of Searock Castle, and I'm being chased by a huge red guy carrying flaming swords. It has a little of the cramped and teetering chaos of a good LittleBigPlanet level, actually, but the jumping is better. While you're hacking out solutions and moving through the environments, Trine 2 offers you a place where anything could happen: where terrible accidents come with unintended, often useful consequences, and intricate plans have a habit of collapsing in hilarious ways. What makes all of these adequate components seem so special, I suspect, is the physics. The puzzles are smart enough, but fairly repetitive, while their solutions - involving pipe-construction, crate-stacking, plant-watering, and some rote lifts from Portal - are rarely ingenious.
Leaping around is an entertaining but rather imprecise business most of the time - you could say that the game's approach to traversal is enthusiastic rather than refined - whilst combat is noisy but fairly simplistic. This is where the warm appeal of the game starts to get hard to define, actually, because it's not really much of a standout as a platformer, a brawler or a puzzler, either. It's a nice suite of fairly basic choices, but Trine 2's no RPG. They've each got a range of simple new powers to choose between as you level up, too, with skill points adding fire or ice to the thief's arrows, say, or allowing the wizard to chuck enemies around. The first game's cast has returned, meaning you play while cycling between a brawling knight, a nimble grapple-hook-wielding thief and a wizard who can levitate objects and conjure a series of blocks and planks. Suddenly you can blast through this chaotic fantasy universe with friends and strangers alike: improvising, collaborating and fighting over who gets to be the wizard.Įlsewhere, it's pretty much the game it once was, with Frozenbyte's vivid 3D art used to craft a new selection of intricate side-scrolling 2D levels laden with puzzles and combat. It's easy to jump into, extremely stable (on the PC/Mac version anyway, which is all I've tested) and it's a crucial addition to the game. Trine 2 doesn't change very much about the basics of the design, but it does take its new campaign online for up to three players. Multiplayer was only available locally, and Frozenbyte's rather earnest class-based platformer could initially seem a little too complicated to appeal to the drop-in, drop-out couch crowd. Trine was a great co-op adventure that too many people worked their way through alone.
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