I have to say I’m very glad that I did not purchase this game at full price. Considering how quickly the game can be fully completed, this should have been given away as a free demo rather than sold as a fully fledged game.
To cut a long story short, Frozenbyte became way over ambitious on developing the latest iteration in the Trine series, spending triple the Trine 2 budget, overall total coming to over $5 million, yet only producing a game that could be fully completed in a third of the time. Frozenbyte’s excuse was that if they had committed to creating a longer game, the final costs would have come to $15 million. They knew beforehand that they had created a short game, yet went ahead and charged more than any other Trine game has cost at launch, asking for £20 on Steam. Well plenty of fans were pretty mad within a few short hours of completing the game, and Frozenbyte responded by putting up a video of apology on their website.
The only way I believe Frozenbyte can make it up to the community is by releasing any further chapters of this game for free, as otherwise, if DLC was to be sold at a later date (even though further development of the Trine games has gone quiet on their end), than this is just an expensive DLC platform. Having been a fan of the previous two instalments, I recommend for anyone who has yet to play them, to pick them up cheaply off certain websites and enjoy yourselves, but stay clear of Trine 3, it’s just not worth the money. I hope from that insight, you’re glad that this website exists. Cutting through the hype (which I was very much part of) and revealing the dirty truths of the game industry.
Now it’s not all doom and gloom for all those that really do want to play this. Standing still and just examining the level of detail in the expansive background will take your breath away. Hardly any resources are used more than twice in this game, every level is bursting with amazing unique 3D art and is the only evidence of why the game took so long and cost so much to make. I’m afraid that’s where the good news ends.
I managed to fully complete this game with all achievements in 5 hours, and I wasted the first half an hour of the game running around in circles before I released I had a broken controller. On the topic of controls, they are frustrating and boring to use. They’ve tried mapping 2.5D movements for a 3D environment, so no more being able to pull off amazing tight bow and arrow shots with Zoya or properly positioning Amadeus’ ‘one’ box. I was not comfortable at all using keyboard and mouse for this gameplay, but even using a PS4 controller became confusing at times as even though there is support for this controller in a few modern titles, Trine does not properly recognise it so referred to buttons such as ‘X’ and ‘O’ as ‘button 1’ and ‘button 2’ etc.
All the heroes have their 2 skills already unlocked from the beginning of the game, but get repetitive quickly with no additional skills to further unlock like the Zoya’s fire arrow in previous games. Puzzles aren’t exactly tedious and become a doddle to pass through, no real effort on the players behalf is actually needed. Combat is also a simple chore. Simple mashing of the ‘hit’ button with the occasional use of Pontius’ bash skill means that there is no need to use either the shield or the other characters to beat enemies.
The environment and objects can be quite buggy. Interactions between the two can cause objects to stutter wildly on screen. If your just speed racing through the game and not bothering with collecting all the pick ups, then you can pretty much just breeze through the levels, taking advantage of wall jumps and Pontius’ shield parachute.
“The cake is a lie”… Seriously?! This is from a bonus level that’s been built upon another company’s joke. Not very original.
The problem with the play field being in 3D though is that you struggle to get a sense of depth. Because the camera is mostly fixed for each scene, if an enemy is advancing towards your character, it can become difficult to line yourself up to attack the monster. Even if they attempted to fix this, there would be no place to map the camera controls onto the controller as the right stick is already used for the ‘3D’ actions of the character. Zoya’s rope swings are already a pain in the ass having to use two sticks to achieve an effective rope swing rather than the one stick that was used in the previous installments. Support for VR headsets would really help this game.
Overall, I’d recommend that you relay from purchasing this game just yet, until DLC and any further costs are announced, because in its current form, 5 hours of gameplay is not immersive, it’s a joke.
