Trine Magic (Blog)

In the last few years I can think of only 2 games have made my jaw hang open in awe when it comes to graphics or artistic s-tyle The first is obvious - Crysis. The second however is Trine. The demo showcased some of the brilliance of this game, but the full game is just pure beauty. Never have I played such a cleverly designed fantastic looking platforming game. It's so incredibly smooth and well put together that I am still pretty amazed by it. Sure lots of recent games, GTA 4, Dead Space, Fallout 3 are doing a lot more, displaying a lot more polygons or characters but none have been anywhere near as smooth and polished artistically as Trine is. Prince of Persia of 2008 was fairly good consistently and had an interesting art s-tyle but in my opinion Trine completely blows everything else out of the water.

I did manage to complete Trine, and enjoyed every minute of it. If you don't have this game then I highly recommend you get it now. It's easily the best game I've played all year so far. Not just the amazing art s-tyle the gameplay is extremely good too. Three characters whom you can swap with at any time to do battle against undead and solve puzzles. The wizard can create boxes, planks and can use them to reach ledges or to smash skeletons (satisfying), the thief can use her arrows to target ranged foes and swing using her grapple. The knight lacks the manoeuvrability of the others but is unmatched for up close undead bashing. Trine is still on sale on Steam, and it's true the game isn't much longer than COD 4 single player but it's an incredible ride.

I'm not sure screenshots do the game justice, because of the 3D backgrounds but here are a few!

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I also nabbed the Section 8 MP beta key on Fileplanet recently and gave it a bit of a shot. It's a cross between Tribes and Battlefield I guess. You can deploy turrets and depots and pilot heavy armor. The levels are fairly large and you can spawn anywhere using pods. It seemed enjoyable but I'm not sure it will catch on because the game doesn't explain much and it does need a bit more polish to really bring it up to scratch.

Wolfenstein is out in a few days, I should be picking that up shortly too. Great news is the multiplayer team basically got let go, probably to save some money. So that means we will have really great post release support for the multiplayer.