Man the Trollhunters franchise doesn't stop releasing one disappointment after another lately.
The original show was great, when I first watched it I was around the age it trying to cater to and you know what? Rewatching it, it is still great. Well until Troll Jim shows up that is. Why did they do that I still don't know and I demand answers. I think I should also mention that there were two spin-off shows which were kind of meh. But through all that I always wanted a game for this series, preferably a 3d one as it would just fit better and I would have really liked exploring 3d environments in this universe, but guess what. This is a 2d platformer, which isn't a bad thing don't get me wrong, but it is a bad 2d platformer.
Jim is just really slow and clunky to control. There is a slide, which they don't tell you about if I remember correctly, but it has just an awkwardly long cool down making me not want to use it most of the time.
The levels are also riddled with enemies which, especially in the last few stages, can be hard to see as they sometimes have the same color as the background. Don't get me wrong they are not strong at all and you will rarely if ever loose a life because of them, but they can be hard to react to.
The game also faces button mapping issues. The A button (on the Xbox controller) can make you Jump, Slide, use the Horngazel (kind of an extra mission to give you coins) etc. The latter being especially annoying as you have to use them mostly on edges where jumping might be useful to not you know die, but if you wait a few seconds you are actually granted the ability to play the game again, so much fun.
The game also bombards you with new abilities and companions (which are more or less glorified abilities with names slapped on them). All of the abilities except for the projectile, which is actually useful to make the game even more easy but is overall pretty forgettable, have something holding it back like the glider being mapped to the A button and the dash being slower than if you simply walked as it also has an (even if it's not too bad) awkward cool down. But the companions are the worst offenders.
They are mapped to the triggers, both of them that is.
If you press one you switch out companions and if you press both you use their ability. Why? This input method is really slow and prone to mis-inputs. There are 4 of them and the controller has an unused D-Pad.
But that isn't even close to the worst thing about them. All of them have a cool down which is made incredibly long by design, to prevent you from spamming their overpowered abilities. This would have been great if they actually had abilities that would give you an edge in combat or something like that, but they are just there to break blocks or make you reach platform you wouldn't reach without them. A cool down just makes these passages really tedious and boring. The last companion is Douxie (who had a minor role in the series and had an entire spin-off where he is the protagonist) who just heals you as if the game wasn't already easy enough. This ability is taken from you like half a level later and is never given back until you beat the game.
The games story starts of in New Jersey (great start) after the events of the show, but after just a few minutes of playtime you encounter the bad guy who sends you back in time. From what I could gather this is before season 3 as you are not recognized by your friends, even tho you are literally wearing the Trollhunter armor and they do not question that, not even once and also Angor Roth is still a "big bad" at that time I guess. Only when you buy a mask that changes you into your human form (I forgot the name for it but it was in the show I think) do they recognize you. It also makes you invulnerable from sun light for some reason, which isn't really important but I just really wanted to point that out. The rest of the game just comes down to:"go there and do that." Just to have an excuse to send you to locations from the show. These don't even make sense sometimes.
You for instance go to the alien planet which at that time should be under siege and also the alien twins are there and somehow do not question you knowing that they are aliens. Now where I just thought about it, why do you even go there?
And so on and so forth. At the end of the game it is revealed that the random troll which could send you through time (the one from the beginning of the game) wasn't the bad guy but that Morgana (the big bad guy from the show) was behind it the whole time.
This is incredibly lazy and I don't think I have to tell you why that doesn't make any sense and how nonsensical her plan was. She also deletes all your friends from existence and Tobys last words are "I don't feel so good" make of that what you will. But she does make for a fun enough final boss from when you ignore all that and just look at it through a pure gameplay perspective.
The bosses are actually consistently the best part of the game in general. They are actually pretty solid.
So is the soundtrack, but it is mostly just taken from the show.
Well in the end they reset everything, but unlike that bad movie that released just this year, they do not destroy the entire plot doing so, so well done I guess?
There are so many more things I could point out that I do not want to go into detail for, like the bad graphics in conjunction with an unstable frame rate, but I don't think that these were even close to the worst things the game did.
Overall the Trollhunters platformer game was an incredibly disappointing adaption of the series.

Reviewed on Nov 24, 2021


2 Comments


2 years ago

Great review!

2 years ago

Thanks