The Half-Assed Guardian
(This review contains a
really, really bad game)
I’ve played a lot of averagely bad
games in my time, but sometimes I come across one so mind-bendingly awful that
it defies expectation. Troll and I is
the latest game to join the ranks of stuff like Star Trek 2013, Star Fox Zero
and Lego Worlds as a recent release
so inanely terrible that it’s just plain stunning.
This one legitimately needs to be seen
to be believed, but I’ll do my best to go over the whole experience for you.
The game is apparently set in Scandinavia
during the late 1950’s, but honestly I find that incredibly hard to believe
because everything looks like it waltzed straight out of Lord of the Rings. The main character lives in a tiny peasant
village, they need to use spears to hunt boar just to eat, and he and his
family are dressed in clothes that would look more at home in a pioneer village
than in 1957. Is this like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village where it turns out at the end that the main character
is living in a secluded area outside of modern day? I didn’t get far enough
into the game to find out, and I’m not well versed enough in Scandinavian
history to know if they actually became a fantasy world for a few years after
World War II, but something tells me that neither of those are the case.
From the moment you boot up Troll and I it’s obvious that this game
is going to be a bumpy ride. The game looks so dreadful that the character
models in Majora’s Mask look better
than these nightmarish mannequins (and by that I don’t mean the 3DS remake, I
mean the original game from 17 years ago). The voice acting is especially
terrible, making me honestly wonder if this was an instance of some family
members of the dev team being called in to play the characters. Sound effects
are also frequently completely missing in cutscenes, while others are insanely
loud compared to the rest of the game.
The story, from what I played, doesn’t
seem to make a lick of sense. Ignoring the fact that Scandinavia’s been
reverted to fantasyland after World War II, the main plot seems to be that
everyone’s trying to kill a Bigfoot for some reason or another. Said Sasquatch
teams up with Otto, the main protagonist, for no explicable reason. Last Guardian this ain’t. The two of
them are then sent on a journey where they must face off against two of the
most nefarious gaming foes in history: clunky controls and a plethora of
glitches.
The controls are horrific, some of the
worst I’ve seen in a very long time. Both Otto and the Troll/Bigfoot thing move
around with all the finesse of a three wheeled shopping cart. The simple act of
getting them to turn around is a chore in and of itself, and don’t even get me
started on how dreadful combat is. While it’s mostly just swinging whatever
weapon you have into your enemy’s face until you win, trying to focus on them
is a task straight from gaming hell itself.
There’s also many, many, many, many
glitches all over the place, causing the game to feel more like the result of a
community center video game creation summer camp instead of a retail release.
For some reason, the entire forest is full of ghosts. There are weird water
ripple effects just hanging in thin air with no explanation, so I just assumed
that the woods were haunted.
Much worse is the problems with an
early quick-time event segment. You’re escaping from a forest fire and you need
to press X at certain times to jump over several identical looking logs. The
only problem is that even when you pull off a jump successfully the game will
sometimes register it as a miss and you’ll die anyways. It took me upwards of
twenty minutes to beat a level that should’ve barely taken five.
I think the funniest part of this game
is the back of the box. It advertises in big letters that Troll and I won “Best Original Game” at E3 2016 from Eyewave Games.
I honestly have to wonder if the folks over at Eyewave saw the game there and
assumed they were going to improve on it when it would be released. Regardless
of what happened there, I honestly feel sorry for the poor buggers now that
their good name is attached to Troll and I
for all eternity.
What’s significantly less funny is
what this game costs. If you want to experience the sheer unintentional
hilarity of Troll and I for yourself,
you first have to pay a suggested retail price of $64.99. The trailer on Steam
also looks significantly better than how the game actually looks when playing
for yourself, so it’s best to disregard that completely. The fact that these
developers decided to try to pull a highway robbery with this piece of crap is
just plain disgusting, and I’m glad that this game looks like one that’s going
to be lost to time.
It should go without saying that Troll and I isn’t even worth a rent, let
alone buying it for that insane price. This game feels like it was thrown
together over the course of a few months by a dev team that just didn’t care,
and how it won the few awards it did at E3 last year is beyond me. While this
game will hopefully be never touched by anyone ever again, I expect I’ll be
seeing it once more when it comes time to list the worst games of 2017 in
December.
FINAL SCORE
1/10
Awful
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