Troublemaker Preview

I don’t like comparing games to other games, but when it comes to Troublemaker there’s just no avoiding a comparison to Bully (AKA Canis Canem Edit). A third-person game that has you attending classes, getting into fights, and is sprinkled with mini-games, though this one is set in Indonesia and not America.

I got a chance to play the prologue which introduced the story and several of the characters. You play Budi, who has just transferred to a vocational school to study programming because his new step-dad got a job somewhere else and his mum agreed to move the family. The new school has a system in place whereby the class that wins a fighting tournament between the classes will get better support after graduating. Luckily, Budi was in a lot of trouble where he used to live because he kept getting into fights, so this system isn’t a deal breaker for him.

The build I played had a whole bunch of fights, so I got to check out the fighting systems more than anything. As the story revolves around fighting, I’d say that’s a good thing to showcase. The controls are pretty basic with heavy and light attacks, blocking, countering, and dodging, and there are special attacks which you can do when a gauge fills. Combat is pretty easy to handle as Budi can do combos, kick small objects, and you get a helpful prompt when to counter. From the trailers and GIFs I’ve seen it looks like fights will get very over-the-top and as crazy as the Yakuza series, which I am all for.

The mini-games present were push-ups, wheelchair “racing”, hide-and-seek, and a board game I forgot to check out. With how slowly Budi runs, I can only hope that he gets a speed boost upgrade so that I can actually find all five students before the timer expires…

While the voice acting in Troublemaker could do with using better equipment, especially since many people sound much better than main character Budi, I thought that everyone put across emotions perfectly well. As they all spoke Indonesian I couldn’t actually understand them, but the sentiment still hit. Music on the other hand was fantastic, really setting the right mood at every turn, and I just wish that the version I played had some credits so that I could look those tunes up.

Troublemaker is built in Unreal Engine, so graphically there’s nothing wrong with it. The environments are gorgeous but the character models are just fine, so they appear divorced from one another. As I say it all works, it’s just a little odd. The cutscenes where characters talk to each other use cartoon representations of everyone, but I actually like that as it helps everyone stand out.

As an indie developer, Gamecom Team has chosen something quite ambitious with Troublemaker. I spent about an hour playing it and it definitely left me wanting more, and I’m looking forward to seeing it release in the next few months.