Trinity Fusion Reviews

Cool Game

I like the metroid style in a roguelike game

A strangely satisfying game.

Like dead cells but different, really hard until it clicks with you. 8/10

Middle of the road review. Decided on a thumbs up, which I talk about at the bottom. The TLDR; Mediocre at present, especially in a space where it is basically competing with games like Blazblue: Entropy Effect. It could be promising with some more work. Overall, kind of a disappointing experience given how nice it looks on the steam page. Flashy and beautiful, but plagued by some things that really bother me. Fortunately I think most of the things are fixable, so hopefully the developers are listening and working on the game. The concept is good but it is somewhat unpolished, and I think there's still a bit of work to be done. It's a decent game, but it needs some TLC before it can really be good or great. Played for about an hour, so this is first impressions. Firstly... I got a handful of steam achievements that claim somewhere between 46% to 53% of players have done the same. And I didn't do anything great or special... so for some reason, most of the people playing this game really don't make it very far. That tends to be pretty telling. Now, I'm a huge roguelite and Metroidvania platformer fan, so this type of game is right up my alley on all counts. Graphically the runs look great. No issues there. Great framerate, though I do have a powerful PC. The scenery looks great, as do the little chests and the enemies. The animations in general look really cool, and all the little lights and bits are easy enough to track. There's enough projecting of enemy attacks that you should be able to react, as long as you weren't busy button mashing. Good job on the graphics during the runs. Now, while the runs look great... the home base has some real issues. The shadows are all kinds of janky, especially anytime the camera zooms in. Wierd shadows over the faces, clothes... it's pretty bizarre. When you talk to someone, the camera zooms in on the two of them like you are going to watch the conversation but... The animations are non-existent, which is strange. So we basically zoom in just to see gently waving character models while ghostly voices talk to us that are supposedly the two silent puppets we are looking at. That's really awkward, and honestly I'm surprised they didn't fix that before release. Also, sometimes your character is even looking the other way, not even at the other person... it's kind of weird. Combat is snappy and responsive, as is jumping. Not a ton of feedback on hitting enemies, but enough that I didn't have any issues with it. Dodging seems to work fine, although on occasion you will find that your dodge slide fails to go through the enemy and you end up trapped under them and take damage. So I think there's some opportunity there to smooth out the interaction between the dodge slide and enemy legs (not talking about the shield blocker guys, either). Some weapons are faster than others, so you do end up finding some you like and some you don't. There are special moves as well based upon the weapon, which is cool. I did have a couple times where monsters are randomly able to shoot at you through the scenery which is a bit bizarre. Worse than that though is that they overlap sometimes and hide. I had one little enemy jump out from right behind the model of another one and hit me. I wouldn't have gotten close if I'd known it was there, and the fact that it can hide behind another enemy does not seem fair. In general though you do need to watch the enemies and learn their patterns, because health isn't very common so you need to preserve it. I'm actually fine with that, because that's how most of these games work. So as long as the fights remain fair, I think this system should work fine. One good note to their credit is that each character kind of feels different... the game doesn't tell you that, but if you pay attention you'll realize one is melee focused, one is ranged focused, and one kind of has a bunch of spells. They can all do everything at some point, but it gives each character a bit of flavor and I thought that was cool. You can switch characters between runs, so play whichever you are in the mood for. I fought a couple boss fights and they were fine... a bit grindy, if you ask me. Especially the tutorial boss, if I'm honest... which seems silly. You have basically no powers other than your basic attack and energy attack, and that boss takes way more hits than it should to put down. Not sure why that is, but I started to get annoyed. It wasn't hard to avoid his attacks and win, it just took what seemed like forever to whittle his health away. That isn't a great opening experience. Next, the difficulty scaling is... well I don't know what it is, but it ramps very quickly. I cleared the first area after picking up all my power ups and all, zoned to the second area. The first 3 enemies I ran into were way tougher, I barely did any damage with my strikes to them. I'm not sure why, it doesn't seem to make sense to have that much of a ramp in enemy health from one zone. I don't know how deep the tuning on this game was, but I would personally say it feels off. I made some meta progression during the hour, which is fine... but the tree seems a bit shallow, and perhaps grindy. There aren't a ton of options, so it basically just ramps the cost for each one. Now there could be more stuff that I cannot see, so to be fair I can't really say this is a holistic look at the progression system, but if what you see here is what you get, then it's way to shallow to be a longstanding roguelike. There just won't be enough progression on average per run to really keep people playing. I mean they are powerful enough... I think the first one gives you bonus damage at low health as a permanent upgrade, stuff like that. But there just doesn't seem to be a lot of them, and the price ramps up quickly. The points for meta-progression are interesting.. there seems to be two kinds, I'll call them blue and yellow coins. You pick them up on runs. Seems random if they spawn or not. Sometimes when you open a chest, you'll have a choice between some item or a yellow coin, so if you want to focus on that you can. Story and voice-acting... well. Story is fine, neat little multi-verse sci-fi. Nothing too new or ground breaking going on other than the idea of fusing your other selves, but it's not bad by any means. I like the different worlds, and I think this could be a fun story. But the voice-acting... oh boy. This may have been a team of first time voice actors, so I don't want to be mean but... I was expecting better. The lines are delivered in really odd, lilting tones which make it very clear that someone was just kind of reading lines off a script and trying to put random emotion into them. You'll have one line with a ton of emotion and hype, then the next one not. It's bizarre, and it really takes you out of the game. This is definitely below average, even for most indie games I play. If I'm honest... I would turn off the voiced lines in this game if it were an option and just read the dialogue. It makes more sense anyway since the character puppets don't actually move their mouths or even look at one another even though the camera zooms in on them. On the plus side, they did a great job with steam deck and gamepad integration. I had no issues there. Graphics settings were fine, overall the game is technically very competent. All in all, I'm not as impressed with this game as I was hoping. I don't want to give up on it though, and I was really wrestling with a score to give. I decided on a thumbs up because I don't want to punish the devs too much when they are passionate and may be able to correct many of these issues. I'm going to hang onto it and come back from time to time to see how the development goes!

Metroidvania gameplay is very good, no complaints. The rougelite part I at first felt didn't really add anything, and I still don't, but I will acknowledge it does soften the worst part of a metroidvania. That is, being stuck on 1 part and just playing it over and over until you get good/lucky enough to get past it. Here you can switch things up by simply using a different character so you're not fighting the same enemies using the same style in roughly the same terrain over and over. There is a bit of an issue where when you first start a save, you can't get very far in a run until a combo of you getting used to the gameplay and you get enough meta stuff to power up a bit happens. The game has 2 meta currencies that let you buy stuff that persist between runs. One of them is for buying direct upgrades, the other is for buying access to new upgrades, and increasing how many of those upgrades you can have active at once. There are also 2 classes of upgrades. The ones you initially have access to are limited by the other meta currency, and a bit later you get access to ones that aren't, but cover very different stuff. Drops in the meta power ceiling currency are quite slim, so later on it can take many runs to get the next power boost as you're just grinding for it.

If you are looking for a great game for a long flight with your steam deck, this is it. One of the best games I played in a while. The battle mechanics and the characters plus weaponds gives it a uniuqe flavor. Go for it at full price.

A very good rogue-like, period. If you're a fan of the genre and a challenge- and you're reading this, you're missing out. Especially at the sale price, its a steal. Devs 100% deserve a piece of the pie. Very well executed game.

Excellent combat mechanics combined with compelling story devices. If you enjoy challenging Roguelikes like Dead Cells or Hades then you will 100% enjoy this game.