Review: Trenched
When its Brutal Legend sequel was nixed, San Francisco developer Double Fine decided to split into four smaller teams, each tasked with a different title. The first two products of the experiment, Costume Quest and Stacking, were met with critical acclaim. With Trenched, they’ve struck gold a third time in a row. Trenched is a delightful gaming cocktail that’s three parts MechWarrior, two parts tower defense, and served with some good-old-fashioned loot whoring. Top it off with some signature quirky humor courtesy of Tim Schafer, and you have the can’t miss XBLA title of the summer.
The game takes place in a bizzare post-World War II alternate history where television-powered robot monsters have taken over the world. Imagine The Man in the High Castle combined with Neuromancer and written by Douglas Adams, and that would be one weird book which may or may not be like Trenched. It’s a very campy setting by design, and it works well because you’re given incremental doses of it through the 6-8 hour campaign.
It seems that in its new development model, Double Fine really has been able to hone in on core mechanics and polish them. That’s one of the advantages of making a smaller title. In AAA games, there is a tendency towards what’s known as feature creep. Features are slowly added in, often before the core mechanics have been highly refined. In the worst cases, you end up with a kitchen sink of mechanics, none of which are particularly interesting. That’s definitely not a problem in Trenched. It was impressive to see how well the mechanics all work. The mechs are fairly nimble, and the controls don’t fight you at all. Even though mech combat and tower defense seem like two disjointed concepts, here they actually flow very well.
Trenched puts you in charge of a “mobile trench,” which for the purposes of this review I’ll refer to as a mech. Most levels have you defend an area from incoming waves of enemies. How you deal with these enemies is a bit of a choice. You can choose to be Rambo in mech form and mow them down with impressive on-board weaponry. Or, you can be more of a strategist and deploy a variety of emplacements that will do the fighting for you.
You have an impressive array of options to prep your mech for battle.
You’ll choose a chassis for your mech based on what primary play style you prefer. But the customization goes far beyond simply picking your “class.” Just like in the older BattleTech games, before each mission you can change your load outs. Depending on the chassis, there will be a certain number of weapon and emplacement slots. This ultimately determines what you can bring into battle.
Different missions will warrant picking different items to equip. This could be confusing, but luckily the game will tell you what type of weaponry is recommended for each mission. The customization is amplified by the fact that there are several different ways to acquire items. There’s an in-game store that allows you to buy/sell items using the money you earned on missions. You can also earn new items by completing goal-based challenges (like killing a certain number of enemies). The final and most addicting way you can get an item is from loot drops.
If you’re a recovering WoW-aholic, the loot will beckon you. Whenever you defeat larger enemies on missions, they will drop loot boxes that you can pick up. Just like in any good action RPG, there are different quality levels. They seemed to follow the World of Warcraft item coloring scheme, so there are purples to be had! There aren’t any randomized stats, but a significant amount of loot nonetheless. If you wanted to pimp out your mech, you definitely would spend some time doing it. There also are some cosmetic things you can change. You can repaint your mech, or get different hats and clothes for your character who controls the mech.
The game would be enjoyable even with just single player, but where it really shines is in co-op. Unlike another game which was released this week, the implementation of co-op in Trenched is stellar. In between missions when you’re walking around your battleship like in Starcraft II, you can recruit up to three other players to join in. Stats are tracked both individually and as a regiment. And, most importantly, there is no competition between players. Any item you pick up, whether it’s a scrap used to build more emplacements, or a loot box containing some phat loot, is shared. So you don’t have to worry about standing next to a boss when he’s about to die, clicking anywhere or some of the stuff I may or may not have done at one point.
Enemies scale with the number of players in the game, so if you don’t strategize you will probably lose. Much like in Alien Swarm, if everyone goes full-on assault mode, you probably won’t complete most missions. You’ll want to have some players to go with engineering chassis and others to go with assault ones. That way you have the perfect combination of the better turrets and better weaponry. On some of the latter missions, where enemies are coming from several different places, you also need to split up.
Goliath online.
The only real complaint I have is that there aren’t additional difficulty levels. It would have been nice to be able to complete the campaign on an even harder difficulty now that my mech is leveled up. But I’ll have to settle for getting gold medals on all of my missions, and decking out my mech. I also had some minor connection issues in co-op, but it seems like it was just a temporary problem with my (or my friend’s) connection as most of the time it worked perfectly fine.
Double Fine really has come into its own as a downloadable game developer; and they certainly hit the mark with this XBLA gem. For $15, you really can’t go wrong. The XBLA “Summer of Gaming” may not officially begin until the end of July, but the lemonade stands are up, everyone’s at the beach, and some tubes are about to get their face smashed in by a mech.
VERDICT: SINGING CANARY
Trenched is available now on Xbox Live Arcade. Reviews appear every Friday on Game Canary. The Game Canary review system is detailed here.
Up next week is a review of Shadows of the Damned.
Tags: Singing Canaries, Trenched, Xbox 360