So We Thought the First Trine Was Pretty...

I have inducted Trine 2 by Frozenbyte yesterday and I was blown away by the sheer majesty of its visuals. The first Trine is still one of the best looking game ever and this sequel manages to outdo the original by providing even more elaborate stage details and a stronger fantasy-infused artwork. Both games are certainly better looking than 99.9% of games ever produced up to this day. It's not only about the visuals either, these games feature imaginative platforming fun that blends perfectly with some action and little bit of role playing. The unfortunate thing here however is that you have to play this game on the Personal Computer to revel in all of its glory.

A reunion of brain and brawn.

Let me tell you why I said that. The curious being that I am, after playing Trine 2 on my PC for an hour, I was just itching to see how the game looks on the consoles. So, I downloaded the PlayStation 3 demo from the PlayStation Store. It was promising at first, because the game was running at 1080p. This is usually a trustworthy indicator that a game is running at that resolution natively because the PS3 will only run 1080p when the source is actually native, unlike the X-Box 360 that will always upscale all signals to 1080p. But then after the title screen loaded up, I immediately saw the difference in quality between the console and the PC version. The game was almost running in slow motion because I just played the game in silky smooth 60 frames per second on the PC and the PS3 version was running only half of that if not less.

I wouldn't mind living in that beautiful village.

Then came the finishing blow. The game looked so blurry with jagged aliasing on both the environments and the character models. Apparently, even though it was running at 1080p, the graphics assets were upscaled from a much much lower resolution. The exquisite details seen clearly on the characters were gone and the ground texture works were also lost to the whole blurry mess. I was really shocked by this. I was certain that the current generation consoles would be capable of at least running this at a much higher resolution. Perhaps the developer just didn't spend as much time on the console versions. One thing is for sure, if you want to experience the true beauty of Trine 2, one of the most gorgeous games of all time, you will have to get the PC version. It's on sale right now at Steam for the duration of the weekend - act now, it's less than $10! Other developers should be ashamed that they charge more for visual mediocrity in their games. All the screenshots posted are from the PC version.

I love my consoles but the PC is the way to go with this game.