Aliens: InfestationCall off the hunt, the trolls have been located. Somehow they have infiltrated WayFoward, usually purveyors of fine digital entertainment, and forced them to create this, the drabbest platformer in recent memory. Worse, it is cynically wrapped in the skin of a TV show that is, by all accounts, legitimately wonderful (this writer is a bit too old for it, and only watches shows about sad detectives in Norway). Trading on the goodwill of good TV to hawk budget run-and-jumpery is not new, but boy, is it depressing to see it from this particular studio.
Trollhunters: Defenders of Arcadia really does the bare minimum to pass as a platformer. You can jump and run side-to-side. There are holes in the floor and platforms that move. Enemies dash at you and you hammer a button to trap them in a hit animation and pummel them into currency. Occasionally it gets really spicy and you crouch and slide through a pipe. You’ll need that one when you hit the sewers in level two. Yes, this is a game where the second level is set in a sewer. Tells you all you need to know, really.
Even though our hero, Jim, is a rigid platforming presence, he’s perfectly able to tackle the obstacles as there’s so little imagination applied to them. If you can beat Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 you can beat Trollhunters with ease. This isn’t to equate difficulty with quality; there are plenty of child-friendly platformers that deliver magic. Think of Kirby’s magnificent run on 3DS. Oh no, now we're thinking of Kirby’s magnificent run on 3DS and sobbing because we could have been replaying that instead of this.
Trollhunters’ single nod to novelty is a gang of assisting characters who provide ‘solutions’ to ‘puzzles’. Think: boxes you destroy with a hammer, or gaps you cross on a hoverboard. Each moment is clearly signposted and rarely are they used to uncover secrets – most collectables are clearly found on the linear path. We particularly love that after three of these powers the game eventually gives up and lets you refill your health with a button press. It’s rare to see a designer shrug and go back back to bed in real-time, but there it is.
The defence of tie-ins usually comes in the form of ‘well, fans will dig it’. And on the surface, there’s a spark of an idea to support that, as a time-travelling story allows Jim to teleport back to the show’s past. Tie-ins rarely move shows forwards; retelling the juicy stuff could be a neat solution. But when that tale is delivered as droning VO over vanilla platforming, there’s no sense of reliving events. Boss fights bring in more iconic characters, sure, but if you can jump over a slow-moving projectile these are done as quickly as they arrive.
Visually, it looks like a pre-vis version of the main show – y’know, the animated storyboards that take recognisable characters but present them janky and unfinished. Character models look true to the show, but have a strange lighting effect that makes them look disconnected from the world, which in turn draws your attention to how ugly that world is. It’s rare that you notice art tiles, the building blocks of 2D worlds, but the way they float on top of crude 3D models of the show’s locations looks thoroughly unpleasant.
And given how barren it all looks, it’s staggering that Trollhunters still suffers frame rate issues and long loading times, both docked and undocked. What exactly is the game loading in those 20-second breaks? It barely has graphics. It’s enough to put you off visiting the central hub entirely, where every shop comes with another loading screen. And for what? The ability to buy health potions you’ll never need? Or play minigames that make the worst Mario Party game look like Super Mario Galaxy? This is staggeringly inept.
Really, all that can be said for Trollhunters is that it’s not technically broken. We got through this £35 game in four hours without any major incidents. Well, aside from the damage it did our human soul to see the barrel so aggressively scraped in this, the 35th year of our lord Mario’s existence. Man, the audacity of releasing something like this in the same month as Super Mario 3D All-Stars. It’s like attending the glitziest birthday bash of the century and using the din of the party to surreptitiously relieve yourself behind the punch bowl. Awful.
Conclusion
It didn’t have to be this way. WayForward has worked minor miracles with licensed fare before – see Aliens: Infestation and The Mummy Demastered. But this is work for hire of the most rotten kind, showing total contempt for the fans it hopes to lure in with a bright, likeable licence. Trollhunters is one of the less enjoyable things to happen to us this year. Given what a year it’s been, that is quite a feat.
Comments 39
What the F**k is this i'm sorry for cursing but you guys have to play stuff like this? sometimes the gaming life is not the always fun.
DreamWorks face spotted
Wow...that os just terrible. I was the tiniest bit interested in getting this for my kids because they watch the show on Netflix but based on this review it would need to hit .99 cents before I buy it.
ALIENS: INFESTATION is one of the crown jewels of my DS collection. Griptonite did some decent licensed stuff like this back in the day as well. See IRON MAN 2 and WEB OF SHADOWS; also on DS.
"It’s rare to see a designer shrug and go back back to bed in real-time, but there it is."
I legit LOL'd at this passage. Throughout the whole review, honestly. Sorry you had to review such a turd, but thanks for the riveting read.
It's def one for the fans only (Mean I will get it when it's on a budget I want my boys back and to muck about on Go Go Sushi) but yeah it's very bare bones game with clear love for the franchise it's self but not the quality it should have been sadly.
The artwork incidentally is based/if not directly using the original concept art for the series so they are in fact very accurate, said art was often reused as contact screens too.
I am shocked that WayForward had anything to do with this. They have such a high platforming game pedigree.
It's not like Wayforward won't know this is terrible, they just do licensed games to help keep the lights on. I'm sure they're embarrassed to some extent.
I'd like to see any studio be hired by a company that knows nothing about games...but would like something made quick and cheap on as many platforms as possible. It doesn't work, and then kids get these rubbish games because parents recognise the cover.
It's a game based on a show, what did you expect?
WayForward do licensed stuff to pay the bills, that's usual, but for them to put out something quite this bad is unusual.
Did they delegate to the interns whilst they focused on their bigger projects?
I wonder if they were forced to do this and thus put out this low quality product.
I get why WayForward do licensed games but they've got to be a bit careful if this is the type of quality they're going to start dishing out for them. They have a pretty good reputation and releasing crappy shovelware is only going to harm it, licensed or not, is only going to harm it.
I am very disappointed. Anytime I see Wayforward attached to something, I usually purchase it. In my opinion, they come as close to making a Nintendo quality platformer as anyone can expect.
I hope this is just an anomaly, and they can get back to there usual great self. Thanks for the head’s up. I’ll probably skip this one.
Man, I was hoping this would be good as a WayForward and Trollhunters fan. Ah well...
Wow, the last two reviews I read on here were by Chris Scullion and Matthew Castle, it’s like the good old days of ONM!
And you guys still have hope with the Bakugan project?
From day 1 reading about this game it reminded me of the Dreamworks Dragons games which were oh so awful, particularly the 1st one, 2nd was only mildly terrible.
Glad to se my intuition still knows.
@basilpesto While I know it was gut-wrenching for you to be made redundant recently, I hope it’s some small consolation that this review was one of the best I’ve read in ages. A properly entertaining drubbing. Oh my NGC and my NGamer of long ago...
It's not as if WayForward haven't done bad games before...
@Balladeer Hey, thanks! I used to avoid the major kickings on NGamer - more Kittsy's department - but good to work those forgotten muscles.
Wayforward are usually ace so this is a big blot in their copy book.
My youngest liked the cartoon series too.
Shame, my kids like the series.
Holy crap, my little brother loves this show. I wish I didn't tell him about this game, he's gonna waste his time and money. No matter what I tell him, he's gonna shoot it off as just an internet thing. And there goes the money.
He once argued with me about something in a game, so I looked up the wiki for the game. He then decide my entire statement was false because it had wiki in the name. And we all know Wikipedia can't be trusted.
Edit:"It’s like attending the glitziest birthday bash of the century and using the din of the party to surreptitiously relieve yourself behind the punch bowl. Awful."
WHAT
Eh, I chalk it up to the fact that even the greatest video game developers or publishers will put out a few stinkers every now and then.
Rare made some great games, but they also made A Nightmare on Elm Street for the NES; Nintendo put out Star Fox Zero for the Wii U; Bethesda put out Fallout 76 for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC.
All of those releases were hot garbage, but it doesn't take away from their library of otherwise great games. So really, I'm not too worried about this.
Shame, loved the show, but this ... just no.
I'd like a special scoring system for awful games. Like taking the worst game ever (probably the old ET) as 1/100 (0/100 being waterboarding) and scoring them out of 100.
Can Nintendo just...acquire WayForward or something?
@PikaPhantom Maybe this was all part of Nintendo's plan: get WayForward to release a crap game, lose value, and then Nintendo buys them at a discount.
Great might have to pass up on this one til it goes on sale.
It's cool that a lot of people love WayForward games, but because of the hype surrounding the company I've tried out a lot of their stuff and been extremely underwhelmed. I lost even more respect for them when they partnered with Limited Run to charge $30 (much closer to $40 with shipping and tax) for a direct port of a single GB Color game on Switch, but they know their fans will eat it up. Remember when people flipped out about Collection of Mana for $40? Or Mario 3D All Stars? Not so when WayForward gives even less.
Will we ever see the end of horrible cynical movie licence games after all these decades?
@Joekun I’m not a WayForward fan either, though Pirate’s Curse is pretty decent and Mummy Demastered was fun enough while still managing to be underwhelming and forgettable. This game does look especially bad though. I guess I’m just not THAT surprised they had something this bad in them.
I just knew this was going to be poor the second the first trailer appeared and for some reason the CGI cutscene didn't match the CGI show.
Then the first gameplay appeared and it looked super bad but I saw wayforwards name, had a little hope that the full package might be something more but nope games still bad.
I don't get why though. The IP can certainly support a game, the studio isn't crap, and its not like this had to be rushed out the show its named after finished 2 years ago, and the games set up doesn't seem to tie into either of the other Arcadia shows, both of which are finished, or the upcoming movie.
Call me crazy, but I think that WayForward has been putting out pretty mediocre games lately, at least when you compare it to what they CAN make. First this, then Seven Sirens which was pretty disappointing for how hyped it was, and Bakugan... the less we talk about that the better...
@Krambo42 I definitely don't think their games have been awful up to this point, I just think they have been overrated. Pirates Curse was probably my favorite of the ones I've played. I agree with your sentiment, which is what I was trying to get at myself, I'm not surprised that they can make an awful game.
Darn - my daughter loves this show and it’s legitimately pretty good - I had high hopes for this game until I found out it was a platformer, and had medium hopes until I read this review.
Idk how you take a Guillermo Del Toro story about killing monsters and make a ***** video game - but here we are.
This is getting a GAME?!?!?!?
Disappointing. My 5 year old loves this show, but I won't be picking this up for him.
That's a shame, especially considering the show is a Guillermo del Toro work.
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