Troublemaker Review

Head to Indonesia to attend vocational school in 2018, thanks to Troublemaker from Gamecom Team. A third-person action-adventure game set in Southeast Asia, which sees you follow the tale of Budi as he moves to the vocational school of Cipta Wiyata because his mum didn’t like him getting into fights all of the time.

Almost immediately, Budi is embroiled in the school’s fighting tournament known as Raise Your Gang, the winners of which are given more support in finding jobs when they leave school. Budi’s class, learning programming, goes by the name Parakacuk, and let’s just say that things escalate from there.

The majority of your time in Troublemaker is spent fighting. While the store page suggests that you wander around the school attending lessons, there’s actually very little of that. At one point, I think that I had five fights in a row, plus cutscenes, so I spent about half an hour unable to save or access the menus. No, that’s not a huge amount of time, but this is a 6-7 hour long game. There are a few mini-games to find around the school grounds, but you only have a few chances to do those before a straight run through the final third of the game.

While a lot of time is devoted to fighting, either as part of Raise Your Gang or otherwise, a large chunk is Budi and his friends interacting. Unless you can understand Indonesian, you’ll be reading along with 98% of it in subtitles (there is the odd English or Japanese word thrown in for flavour). Unfortunately, a bunch of typos and seeming mistranslations got through, but this is an indie game, after all.

The story and character interactions are all great; I really enjoyed getting to know the Parakacuk crew. The voice acting, while admittedly I couldn’t understand it, certainly conveyed the emotion of scenes well, and the merchant Richard was great.

Troublemaker’s graphics are notable in that the Gamecom Team has done a great job in creating a realistic environment with characters that fit into that setting well. Then you have the cutscenes, which overlay the realistic bits with cartoonish characters to really amp up how emotive the scenes play out. Sure, they might not suit everyone’s taste, but I really enjoyed how it all looked.

Given how the developer almost immediately announced a sequel with a bigger scope, it’s hard seeing Troublemaker as much more than a prologue. Don’t get me wrong, this is a complete game whose story has a three-act structure; there’s a full list of upgrades, New Game+, and everything like that. But it had only been out for eight months before Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream was announced.

If you’re looking for a game set in an Indo-Pacific country that lets you get into fights and play mini-games, there are certainly more expensive options. But if you want a bite-sized crack at life at a school in Jakarta, then you should check out Troublemaker. It’s currently available on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.