Nice graphics, but just generic and imprecise gameplay
Trine is a physic based 2D platformer developed by Frozenbyte. In the game the player takes control of a mage, a thief
and a knight, all merged into a single character. The player can switch between the three character at any moment, so that the whole "merged into one character" becomes a bit meaningless, as it ends up feeling not much different then switching weapons in another game. The thief has a rope to swing around with and bow and arrow to shoot enemies at a distance, the knight has a shield and a sword and the mage can create boxes and bridges as well as grab and move objects around.
Whenever one of the characters dies, the player can continue with the others he has left, if all die, he will be reset to the last checkpoint. The world state doesn't get reset when this happens and enemies that have been fought or puzzles that have been solved stay as they where. When at a checkpoint spot, all the dead characters will also get revived again. While this removes frustrations, it also makes the game feel a bit pointless, as it is way to easy to abuse the respawn mechanics. Fighting enemies thus becomes more a matter of mindlessly throwning yourself at them and then respawning, then any kind of careful approach. It doesn't help that the game often throws more enemies at you then you can handle in a sane manner.
The puzzle in the game aren't all that good either, if one would even want to call them puzzles. They are just the generic physics inconviences with a bit of button pushing thrown in. The annoying part with most of them is that they don't rely on thinking, but on execution and you end up having a lot of situations where you simply have to glitch around with the physics engine.
Overall I can't say I liked Trine much. It's graphics are certainly quite pretty and colorful, but the whole core gameplay just feels generic, imprecise and uninteresting. The controls are very floaty, the abilities you have don't really combine in any interesting way and the respawn mechanic just makes things to easy. The game also lacks a story. While there is an intro, outro and a bit of in-game dialog, which are all well done, none of them manages to evoke a feeling of progressing or continuity, thus you are essentially just running through a random series of levels without ever feeling of getting somewhere. The lack of new enemy types in later levels doesn't help either. So while not an awful game, it's not a good one either.
The game took me 4:30h to beat.
