Trine 2

This might be one of the few dedicated co-op game I've ever reviewed. But that is mostly not my fault. The gaming industry just doesn't make that many co-op games and I guess I don't really gravitate towards them either. I don't even honestly know how I ended up buying Trine 2 because I know for a fact that I never played the first Trine.

Trine 2 is obviously a sequal in the Trine series and is basically a three player co-op puzzle platformer. It was developed by Frozenbyte and due to the fact that its available on all major consoles and PC operating systems was published through a couple of company like Nintendo and Atlus.

The thing that instantly stood out for me when I was watching the Trine 2 trailer and actually playing the game was its art style. It most like the factor that actually won me over and got me to actually buy the game since it looks so god damn beautiful. There isn't really anything that is unique about the world that Trine 2 built visually or anything ground breaking in terms of execution, it is just a really well executed game visually. The really variant color pallets used to bring the different levels to life, the intelligent use of light and shadow to control the mood and an extreme attention to detail to everything that was on screen from the background to the protagonists. All of this just made being in the game a really delightful experience and it managed to keep me occupied as I look around the screen picking out all the details while I waited for +Ahmed Jadaa to get back from whatever he was doing so that we could keep playing the game.

Trine 2 only has two other aspects to really talk about, its narrative and you know its actual game mechanics. The narrative has to be the most negligible part of the game for me. I might have not given that much of a chance, but then again it might not have been anywhere near interesting enough for me to pay attention to it.  But from what I gathered its a pretty basic storyline, with an evil sister imprisoning a good sister and you being there to help the good sister take her rightful place back as ruler of the area. The DLC is even more basic just being a standard rescue a damsel scenario. But, at the end of the day, you could say that the narrative is there because you just need a reason to take the player from one room of puzzles to the next and you wouldn't entirely have been wrong. 

What we can all agree on though is the fact that puzzles and co-op mechanics are the core of the game. In terms of creativity the puzzles are fairly creative and the three different characters that you can switch between are designed quite well with one being a Warrior, the other a Wizard and the final one an acrobatic thief. I wasn't to much of a fan of how the puzzles were always clearly giving you a hint of how to solve them, I don't remember an instances where it took us more than a few minutes at most to actually figure out what we needed to do. What was even worse was that some of the powers given to the character you could switch between more often than not allowed you to entirely skip past some puzzles without needing to solve them at all. I choose to view this as a design failure since as a player I was entirely skipping multiple puzzles that the level designers had spent hours putting together with powers the developers had given me. It just a red flag to me that in the design process the game simply wasn't tested enough since this kind of stuff shouldn't have been so easy to pull off. There is another complaint that I feel deserves some attention althought it isn't a complaint of mine. A friend of mine had complained of the fact that the game was mind numbingly boring and sometimes impossible to compete alone, but I don't think that is fair since the game was designed to be played with people. But they might have been able to save him the grief simply by not allowing him to play alone, instead of putting in a lame single player experience where he could switch between the three character.

I don't think that I regret buying the game since I did have a fun time playing it. But I'm torn between whether source of that fun was the game or the fact that I occasionally got to kill +Ahmed Jadaa by being a straight up asshole. I wouldn't go so far as to warn people off by the game by any means but at the same time I'm not going around telling anyone to buy it. But I guess that if you do have a few friends willing to try a co-op puzzle experience then Trine 2 wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for you to try out together.