Beautiful, great value and fun
| Platform | OVERALL |
|---|---|
| Wii | 9.00 |
| Overall | 9.00 |
|
Trine 2 can be bewilderingly beautiful. Lets get this out of the way first, the main pleasure you derive from the title is the fantasy setting and lush visuals. It's a 2.5D platformer. It's pleasant and not overly punitive you have ample checkpoints and restarts. You play as 3 characters at once and switch between them at will. It works very well, when you play online or local multiplayer you each get a separate character and have to co-operate to beat the game. As the archer you can use a grappling hook to latch onto things and swing or pull yourself up. As the knight you will be mainly shielding yourself or hacking away at goblins. As the magician, my favourite you will be using your magic to manipulate objects in game with physics. Imagine creating and stacking blocks and planks with physics to get over obstacles? This is where the main benefit of Wii U comes into place because you get faaaaaaar more flexible and responsive touch controls to use his powers and you can use them whilst still looking at the gorgeous HDTV screen too. The game also has off screen play too. So in the main game you navigate through a platformer environment, hack some goblins and then have puzzle points where you have to think creatively to pass areas. There are multiple ways to get past these and they are taxing but not taxing enough to be punitive. You also have Miiverse to ask for help if you need it. I have beat Trine 2 and I am halfway through the Goblin Menance expansion which comes with this package. So far I am about 15 hours in so I expect this game will last you near 20 hours, which for a download title is excellent. The Goblin Menace, graphically is on another level to the main game, it can look stunning in parts with a cleaner, sharper more vivid look. The texture quality and shaders are great. So Trine 2 already looks better on Wii U compared to other consoles: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-trine-2-face-off And then the Goblin Menace looks on another level to Trine 2 on Wii U. So it's a good little indicator of how the hardware is better in some respects with regards to the GPU and RAM. The devs have mentioned on a couple of occasions how the Goblin Menance requires considerably more power and how it's too demanding for older consoles. So whilst some Wii U launch ports have suffered it's nice to see the opposite side of the equation. As for the gameplay in the Goblin Menace, I'm unsure how I feel about it compared to the main game. It is more difficult, a lot more difficult and it will take longer to beat not because it has more content but because it is harder. Also whilst I have had no problems in the main game I have had 2 glitches in the GMenance. Nothing game breaking just some audio went out of sync and frame rate locked up when I did something to jam a waterspout up. Still, wonderful presentation and fun gameplay. So overall whilst the gameplay is not groundbreaking or amazing, it's very pleasant to pootle through and beautiful to look at. The touch screen controls work well and the fantasy world is well realised and beautiful to look at. Given the length of this game and it's price, as a downloadable game you can't really go wrong. |
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Posted by gamingeek Mon, 24 Dec 2012 13:35:10
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travo (4m)
Nice job on all of them.
Now at 50% off (£7) it is a much more interesting proposition. Have you finished the expansion as well?