Trinium Wars Preview

 Insel games last crossed our transom with Fishing MMO World of Fishing but now the Maltese outfit have taken a step into the science fiction arena and… fluffed it horribly.

The English translation appears to have been done using babelfish in 2005, (if you can explain to me what “it is maiden for Newbie” means please do so), the graphics are on a par with the likes of Neocron and Unreal Tournament 2003, and sadly the quests are pretty much all of the “go kill X of Y and bring me Z” ad nauseam.

Despite having gifted free keys out on reddit and via social media, the population of the game is somewhat lacking although that will no doubt pick up with time.

As with other free-to-play games, there is a cash shop that enables you to upgrade various things like inventory space and storage, although questing will allow you to upgrade those a couple of times for free. One thing you will need to be paying out for though is identifying high end equipment so you can use it.

Character customisation is basic at best. You pick a race , class and visual style and that’s it. Class skills are generic and after obtaining nine of them are just levelled up versions of themselves with nothing new being introduced to break up the tab-click-wait-tab-click monotony. Most of the time the tab-click-tab-click grind will drive you to distraction and result in you not bothering to do more than auto attack.

The “resource wars” content is a decent concept mixing in real time strategy a-la classics like Warzone 2100. Build a base by selecting different building types, grind materials to construct said edifices so you can grind more resources to craft items, armour, weapons and the like.

Vehicle use is shallow and dreary. Vehicles are generic with no differences to the handling of each one and are instanced. For three to four minutes, you float about over the ground much in the same way early 80s arcade machines seemed to handle it. The vehicle doesn’t feel like it’s the thing moving, more that a big play mat is being slid about under it by giants while you sit floating around like a cloud not really interacting with the scenery or other vehicles in any meaningful way.

Most of this game is the old Kill X of Y grind that was fine 10 to 15 years ago when just the idea of some of those names on the screen being real people in other towns and countries, but these days its staid and old hat to say the least.

I wish Trinium Wars the best I really do, but in its current state I don’t see it surviving long enough to make it out of Early Access let alone being successful. One to avoid I'm afraid.