The Trench Reviews

This game is really bad. It's very short and what we get is extremely boring. It seems interesting - rescue mission on the submarine to the unknown trench under the ocean. But nothing that comes to your mind with this description will ever happen in this game. Controls for the boat are awful - you can only use keyboard, you get movement in all 3 axis and you're able to slowly turn horizontally. For the game with a bit of exploration you'd like to have mouse control, ability to rotate the boat freely - even at slow pace - giving the chance to look at things at different angles. Nope. Apart from diving, you pick up stuff left by the previous crew. You use a robotic arm to do that which is painful. You can only do that while stationary, so with the fixed camera you can't really judge the distance to those items. If you'll get too close, they appear much bigger than they should. It's probably bad programming. Instead of hitting the submarine and perhaps bouncing off, they just appear bigger and bigger. Anyway, I've spent 1/3 of my game time figuring out how to pick up those damn things. Each time I thought the item is in reach, it was not, because I was still too far away from it. In the end the best solution is to get very close to them, when they get unnaturally big. So all you really do is navigate down from one clue left by previous crew to the other. Now, there's like 5 or 6 items, each time you get one you just listen to short audiolog (why audiologs were left in water by the previous crew is a mystery) - and that's all the story in this game. Few short audiologs. At each place you can see a bit of environment, some fish or whale skeletons. Nothing special. Then you arrive at the location where you can walk. You turn around, and see your boat was actually just a square box with walls thin as paper. [spoiler]You go into the cavern, discover mysterious monster and instantly die[/spoiler] (sorry for the spoilers, I'm sure you didn't expect that). I understand this is a work of the hobbyists. A father and a son - and I can imagine how much fun they had making their first game. Game development is not an easy task, and even such a small game required work, some learning, an effort - that's for sure. But this should be a free game. Asking money for this is a bit too much. It's really not worth any money - there are way better games available for free. It's cheap, and still, does not offer anything worth 2$ or something like that. I didn't have fun with this title - it's not even bad in a funny way.