Thoughts on the Trine games

That's unfortunate to hear. I suppose at least I didn't pay full price for 3.

I have the two games on my Steam account, I got em both for 6 MXN each (Which is like 30 Dollar cents these days)

I haven't played them because my PotatoCore™ computer can't run either and quite frankly all of the cheap Steam games I've played recently have left me extremely underwhelmed.

I may revisit this thread in a month from now if the PC components I ordered arrive but you guys really are helping me generate even more negative connotation toward both games <.<

Guilion - Keep in mind the games aren't exactly bad - while I'm not a fan (I dig the art and the story, but not the gameplay itself), my wife liked them enough to get almost every achievement in all 3 games; but then, she prefers puzzle games over action ones. As spidershinobi said, you shouldn't go expecting platformers with puzzles: they are puzzles first and foremost, and as the puzzles are based on physics, they are never too complex (or you would see a lot of impossible situations because the objects usually don't react as you expect).

So, my components arrived the other day and I blazed through both games in about 10 hours, my general opnion of them: Better than I expected. Detailed opinion? I think I will have to break this into different categories with as little spoilers as possible.

Story: The story for the first Trine is pretty Peter Molyneux post Syndicate wars. Which is to say extremely cliche and not very good. The fact that every segment of the story is broken into small cutscenes that can last up to 3 minutes at the begining of every level doesn't help very much, not to mention the story is so simple I could follow it without any problems by skipping most of the cutscenes and just listening to the dialog the characters share through the game.

I think this is something Trine 2 got better, the cutscenes were cut to only 6 lines of dialog at the begining of every level and the rest of the story is told by dialog and by small segments of it scattered through the levels (Mostly in the forms of books that you can stop and read if you feel like it). Although I can't say the story was unpredictable it was still fairly enjoyable thanks to the format it was presented in.

Something both games fail misserably at though is the characterization of the main cast, little was done in this department and they never develop beyond cliches related to the clothes they're wearing.

Gameplay:  The gameplay is quite simple once you get the hang of it, you have three different charcters and each one of them has different gimicks used to help you to get through puzzles (The thief can use a grapling hook, the mage can levitate objects, the knight can use his shield to deflect fire and other hazzards you get the idea).

I'll mirror everyone else when I say the game is a puzzle game broken by fighting and platformers segments. However the puzzles themselves are never too challenging and the battle system is pretty mediocre, both problems tied to the same issue: The mage is OP as hell and the knight is completely useless. The reason for this is simple; the game is a physics based platformer and what can the mage do? Create objects and platforms, while this wouldn't be a problem in any other game and would be a pretty mediocre skill this is a freaking physics based puzzle game and it's rendered quite useless when you can create the physics yourself. You get stuck in a puzzle for more than 5 minutes? Just summon the mage and find a way to break it, you will succeed eventually. Meanwhile the knight should be the most useful class in combat and yet it pales in comparisson to the thief. The reason? You can't target enemies behind you while you have the shield up, meaning if you go against more than 3 enemies at a time you are completely screwed while the thief can easily switch targets and is overall more agile than the knight.

They tried to fix this unbalanced in Trine 2 by nerfing the hell out of the thief and the mage and adding segements where only the knight could go through. However they still failed at it, as one of the skills of the thief renders the ability of the knight to break walls completely worthless. Trine 2 also has it's fair share of glitches too and while they tried their best to make the puzzles harder they also limited their solutions to one single solution which once left me with a puzzle completely unsolvable and me having to restart THE ENTIRE LEVEL in order to have a second shot at it (Should be noted restarting checkpoints DOES NOT restart puzzles so take into consideration depending on what you do you may get stuck forever in limbo).

Graphics: You will find little to no complains from me in this department. Both games look gorgeous and they may as well be on my top list of "Games from the seventh generation that will survive the test of time", however the only complain about this one is that sometimes you can't tell the difference between objects in the foreground and the background. This happened to me the most in Trine 2, particularly with things such as levers, platforms and ropes (As the devs in a stroke of pure genious decided to recycle assets and add them into the background) However this didn't happen very often and as such I don't think it's worth considering.

If you were to ask me which one I preferred the most the obvious answer would be Trine 1as it felt more polished if a bit more broken but I would still recomend both games if you can get them for cheap like I did, thrust me you can do a lot worse than Trine 1 and 2 for 30 cents.

For the prices I've seen it on sale for, I'd say it is worth it if you have folks to do multiplayer with. If I recall, you game with your kids @dschult, so it might work well for that.