Troll and I Review

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