Troll and I Review: This Troll Should Have Stayed Under The Bridge

Troll and I attempts to combine action oriented puzzle-platforming with an intriguing story about a boy and beast but falls terribly short in its execution.

Developer: Spiral House Ltd.

Publisher: Maximum Games

Platforms: PC (Version Reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox One

Release Date: March 21, 2017

E3 2016 was the first time I heard about Troll and I, and initially, the game’s premise intrigued me. At the time, The Last Guardian still had not yet been released, and Troll and I‘s story of a boy and beast draws obvious parallels to Sony’s long-awaited adventure game. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Troll and I had also undergone a less-than-ideal development cycle involving delays due to switching publishers. And after playing through the game in its entirety, I think its release should have been pushed back even farther. Or just scrapped entirely.

Troll and I tells the story of a young boy Otto who goes on a grand adventure with a big goofy troll (aptly named…Troll) out in the mountains of post-WWII Scandinavia. Long story short, hunters are trying to capture Troll, there are unexplained monsters crawling out of the ground, and Otto gets caught up in the mess. Right from the start of the game, we learn the hunters have destroyed Otto’s farming town and captured his mother. So naturally, the ultimate goal is to save Mom.

Even Troll’s facial expressions resemble E.T. donning a Bob Marley wig.

So not the most unique plot in the world, but nothing inherently wrong with it. But the actual game failed to tell this story in a meaningful way. I found myself not caring at all about the characters: I never felt like I had the chance to bond with any of them. This supposed “big adventure” was bland and filled with repetitive action. There was little to no build-up to any major events, and no culminating climax either. The mid-game boss fight was more climactic than the game’s ending.

The voice acting was monotonous and dry, which matched well with the stiff animations and janky production value. I went in looking for a heart-wrenching story about a boy and his otherworldly companion. Something similar to the Iron Giant or E.T.. Even Troll’s facial expressions resemble E.T. donning a Bob Marley wig. Instead, we got a fumbling attempt at character development that left me asking how much longer until the game was over.

Unfortunately, the story is by far the least of Troll and I‘s problems. The game tries to utilize a number of different gameplay elements and mechanics but fails to combine them all in a fluid manner. I can see flashes of The Last Guardian, Uncharted, and especially the recent Tomb Raider reboots all mixed together. There is hunting, crafting, climbing, platforming, stealth, combat: all standard fare. The concepts are all there, but the execution leaves much to be desired.

The main gameplay loop involves various puzzles and combat that require cooperation between Troll and Otto. Despite the fact there is a fair amount of backtracking through the map, the game is completely linear. There is no in-game map, which was clearly a design decision. But the majority of the game’s environment looks the exact same, making navigation unnecessarily confusing. At one point you are even directed to head south – but how am I supposed to know where south is without a compass or map? Even if I wanted to use the sun for direction, the game randomly shifts between day and night between map areas.

You will find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time wandering around this labyrinth of a map. It’s almost as if Troll and I wants you to explore, but only within the confines of small areas filled with dead ends. You are frequently faced with various “puzzles” that require using Otto’s small size and nimbleness and Troll’s strength. One commonly used mechanic was using Troll to lift large platforms to act as a bridge so that Otto could cross a previously unpassable gap. The most difficult part of these puzzles was managing to sit through the character’s slow, repetitive animations over and over.

Troll and I features a split-screen co-op mode as well, but I struggle to understand why. It almost feels tacked onto the game as an afterthought. A huge portion of the game was spent playing either as Otto or Troll in fifteen-minute segments, then switching back to the other character for another fifteen minutes. How would this make for compelling cooperative gameplay? Since when is sitting around waiting for your friend to do something fun?

Throughout the game, you either are fighting against human gun-wielding hunters or these creepy monsters apparently called Ahky. The game never actually tells you their names, I just read it in an achievement description – talk about immersion. The bigger Ahky look like The Lord the Rings orc ripoffs, while the other smaller ones look like a meth addicted Splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They crawl their way out of these fissures in the ground, which Troll can close by throwing rocks at. This becomes more of an exercise of how quickly one can close these cracks more than actual combat.

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You can fight with Troll, using powerful ground pounds and swipe attacks, or with Otto using various craftable melee weapons and spears. But ultimately, the combat is extremely repetitive. With only three real types of enemies that have obvious telegraphing attacks, fighting seemed more of a nuisance than enjoyable. And the AI is anything less than stellar. Enemies might as well be blind, as sneaking up and assassinating them requires little to no skill. Even if they do engage you, you can just button mash your attacks until you eventually just kill them. Combat only becomes remotely difficult if you are trying to take on a swarm of enemies at once.

And in that case, you can usually just fight with Troll instead. Or at least try to. His pound attack is nearly impossible to aim, so sending enemies flying with his swipe attack is usually the way to go. Even that can be hard to use due to the game’s over-the-shoulder camera angle that fills most of your screen up with Troll’s body instead of the enemies around you. Troll doesn’t always play well with the environment either, frequently getting himself stuck on trees or boulders. Or your enemies bug out and get stuck in cliffs or walls, making them impossible to attack.

Switching between the two protagonists is pretty seamless. You can have Otto mount Troll, or tell one or the other to wait or follow. You can also call for help, which should make for an epic moment: imagine Troll barreling through the trees, tossing Otto’s attackers like ragdolls and saving Otto. Instead, it’s more likely that Troll is bugged out on a bridge he is unable to cross. Or he didn’t listen to your stay command in the first place, running out with you into what was supposed to be a stealth combat sequence. You can actually even skip large fight sequences altogether. On two separate occasions, I threw Otto onto Troll’s shoulders and just ran to the next checkpoint, completely avoiding all combat.

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Troll and I also features a skill system, which was largely left unexplained in the tutorial. There are various Troll and Otto idols scattered around the game that award skill points. These let you purchase different perks like additional health points or increased melee attack damage. Other abilities seemed essentially useless, such as increasing your tracking ability. Outside of hunting some boar in the game’s tutorial, I never once saw a use for tracking or hunting at all. Most of Troll’s abilities also seemed pointless, save for his healing ability.

This seems to be a trend with Troll and I: including different game mechanics that serve no real purpose. It gives the game this unfinished feeling like the developers had all these ideas that never fully came to fruition. Another example is the collectible diary pages hidden in the game, which you can’t even read. This is a missed opportunity to explain more about the game’s lore and provide some immersive background information. It’s too bad mechanics like this, or unused games abilities like stealth, don’t actual play into the game’s story or puzzles, as that would have helped break up the repetitive gameplay tremendously.

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Have I mentioned the game’s janky animations and graphics? The game looks like it was developed at the tail end of the PS2 era. The animations frequently bug out, both in-game and in cutscenes. Randomly characters will be missing from scenes, or there will be hilariously awful clipping. My favorite is when Otto dies, the game cuts to a scene with Troll angrily roaring, but at least half the time his face was partially clipped into the side of a cliff. The voice lines and sound cues frequently bug out too, such as Otto yelling out “Troll where are you?” despite him being directly next to Otto. Or battle-themed music playing when there shouldn’t be, and vice versa.

At one point after Otto died, my game completely crashed. The apparent last autosave point was about a half hour before that, forcing me to replay an already frustrating segment a second time. There is no manual saving feature in Troll and I. I felt that the game could have included more autosave points, as one death makes you restart from your last save. This gets frustrating when you die for unfair reasons, such as Otto failing to climb a cliff properly for some ungodly reason and falling to his death.

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Troll and I shows small glimmers of a good game. When it actual is playing at the correct time, the game’s symphonic string orchestrated music is wonderful. The game’s premise, blending 80s movie tropes with Nordic mythology, was a solid story idea. The game featured a number of gameplay mechanics that could have gelled well together but mostly went unused. It’s frustrating because I can see the direction these indie developers wanted to take Troll and I. But the execution just wasn’t there. I found myself just wanting the game to be over more than I was enjoying playing it. That is a telltale sign that this is one troll that should have stayed under the bridge.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.