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Trine

Frozenbyte, a Finnish developer known for Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor returns with a strange and unique take on the old school side-scrolling 2D platformer genre. Trine may be technically a platformer, but it mixes in concepts from one of the best puzzle games of all time - Blizzard's early masterpiece, Lost Vikings. To top things up, Frozenbyte has polished up extremely shiny 3D visuals and spiced everything up with a cup of physics engine abuse and... the end result is Trine.

First off, there is a storyline, but it is mostly just a weak excuse to explain away the fact that in Trine you have three main characters - Knight, Thief and Wizard - who all somehow end up fused together. You play as one character but you can switch between the three at any time. Each character has his own strengths, weaknesses and special abilities. Each character also unlocks additional abilities as you gather loot and gain experience along the way.

Goal is simple - to get our three heroes through each linear side-scrolling level while chopping down hostiles, collecting experience vials and emptying chests. Loot includes items with various bonuses that you can trade between characters and new abilities for each character. Natural hazards and legions of skeletons, bats and other assorted nasties stand in the way and plenty of things are hidden in places that at first seem impossible to reach. The trick is to use the available character abilities in creative ways to overcome any obstacles, switching between the heroes as needed.

Thief, Wizard and Knight and Trine that causes them all to merge as one.

Hostiles come in many sizes but are generally easy to dispatch.

Combat is mostly a side-dish - you get some spawns of skeletons, bats and a an odd boss monster or two along the way and there seems to be a certain per-level quota of monsters to kill for experience. Defeated enemies also drop energy vials and bonus health items in liberal quantities so unless you decide to go for a swim in lava or fall off a cliff with no bottom, you have to fail pretty badly to actually die at the normal difficulty level. Higher difficulty levels make combat harder mostly by increasing the damage you take from any hits you fail to block or avoid.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Visuals, PerformancePage 4: Summary, Scoring

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