Indie Game of the Week 413: Trifox

From Triforces to Trifoxes, I'm moving on from Zeldersatzes this week to play... a top-down action-adventure game. Oh. Well, this one has a few significant differences from everyone's favorite Elf Boy in Trouble series (that you can play in public anyway) by instead sitting somewhere between a Crash Bandicoot and Ratchet & Clank in the great pantheon of anthro platformers. The... panthroeon. I'll get back to figuring out that one. Trifox, from Belgian team Glowfish, is about an idle inventor fox who has his impressive array of gadgets stolen by a megalomaniacal wolf whom intends to take over the world with all this purloined tech. Still left with a few tricks up his sleeve, the titular whiz goes after his burglar and his minions with three distinct arrays of combat gear.

So, the idea of this game is that's a 3D platformer with a heavy emphasis on combat, often in little arenas that have waves of enemies pouring in from above. That's the Ratchet & Clank comparison for the most part. Where Trifox sets itself apart is that it has a suite of upgrades and gear for three distinct "classes" or playstyles: the Warrior, who emphasizes tank-style defense and melee; the Engineer, who employs drones and turrets to distract foes while falling back on his own impressive firepower; and the Mage, who can use magic (a separate gauge) to zap enemies with attack spells while keeping them at bay with illusions and shields. Given your vulnerability it's usually the case that you want to bring one defensive option along with three offensive: you have five buttons overall for setting up a loadout, using the gadgets of one, two, or all three "trees", though one of these buttons is always dedicated to the dodge (for Warriors it's a dash, for Engineers it's hovering away with a helicopter backpack, and for Mages it's a blink teleport). Through these myriad options you can eventually zone in on a loadout that best suits your approach to the game's challenges: however, you have to buy all these upgrades first, so it seems like it's smart to specialize early and keep experimenting with new acquisitions.

Trifox has four "worlds" with each, barring the last, having three normal levels and a boss battle. There's some amount of platforming to be done but not a whole lot, solving the usual environmental puzzles like stepping on buttons or dodging gauntlets of deadly traps. Your health bar is somewhat generous but drains pretty quick both in combat and if you should happen to fall into pits often. The checkpointing is... less than generous in most occasions, so it's prudent to avail oneself of the red health potions in the crates and barrels scattered around most areas that otherwise largely only exist as target practice. These levels start fairly short but get more and more bloated the further you get in: the stages in World 3 took me the best part of an hour each, compared to the ten minutes apiece it took to conquer the ones in World 1. Much of that time is spent in the combat, which is extremely frequent. The game has a limited number of enemy types so it tends to throw them at you in ever more crowded and elaborate configurations: often, survival is a case of proper crowd control and kiting than trying to wade into the fracas guns blazing.

Now, I like a good 3D platformer with a twin-stick shooter sort of vibe but Trifox is full of irritating quirks that often made the game a chore, certainly in its later areas. In addition to the poor checkpointing you also have the great combo that is having unskippable cutscenes on top. Characters talk in incomprehensible Banjo-speak so there's no pertinent information these little cutscenes impart other than to drag the pacing down if you've been taken out a few times already. Employing guns and fireballs against these hordes seems like a preferable alternative to trying to hit them with a big hammer, especially since enemies do not flinch in the slightest at your attacks and cannot be interrupted so any melee approach will always be attrition-based, but as there's no auto-aim you have to be perfectly angled towards an enemy to actually hit them with ranged weapons and that can make the smaller and more persistent enemies that much more annoying to deal with. It also has a problem where the difficulty continues to ratchet up while simultaneously dripfeeding you new gadgets to use: there's a dichotomy here as experimenting with new tech will likely get you murdered fast, since by the late-game it expects you to have prioritized the gear you're best with. So your options are to either play boring older levels with the new gear or the new stages with your boring old loadout. It's also the case that everything has way too much health, even the destructible crates and vases, and so you spend far too much time slowly dropping the health bars of even the weakest enemies while they continue to march up to you and pound you. The platforming's not much better, suffering that LittleBigPlanet foible of having platforms with indeterminate boundaries that more often than not have you sliding off the edges if you don't land on their center mass.

I wouldn't say I had high hopes for Trifox, especially as 3D platformers aren't exactly a bustling arena for Indie developers owing to their relatively demanding production requirements, but it just about met what few expectations I had between its clever mix-and-match style of class-based loadouts that offer both versatility and variety and a few welcome QoL additions here and there like plentiful health drops and being able to bounce from a level at any time with your progress saved if you just went back in for some collectibles (which didn't do anything, so that was cool). For all its anthro mascot platformer swagger the game it reminded me most about was Midway's Dr. Muto: similarly a flawed action platformer starring a mad inventor that had some cool ideas but was lacking in its execution.

Rating: 3 out of 5.