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Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll is the type of game that you could review in seven completely different ways depending solely on what mood you're in at the time. It's possible to play devil's advocate and come up with all-new conflicting reasons why this game is great or why it's terrible. Ultimately, I enjoyed myself with this game. It is incredibly far from perfect in so many ways, but it is a skillfully crafted game if ever there was one.
In most games, critics praise the art designers or the bug-free coding or the genius game design. In Trinity, the producers should be getting the real credit. It's obvious from the outset that this game was made on a shoe-string budget. The cutscenes are simple pictures of the characters talking back and forth. There are also no actual cities in the game; it's all just a menu screen with a picture of a city in the background. This is not an RPG operating with Bioware-sized budgets. And yet they managed to create a solid fifty-hour RPG, and that deserves commendation. The developers of this game clearly knew what the task was, they knew exactly how long everything would take to implement, and they made a better game because they didn't shoot for the stars.
The biggest issue is the lack of interesting questing content. There are occasional important story-based quests, but for vast hours in between there is a ton of busy work. When the game opens, you're dropped into the world with nothing more for an impetus than "you want to get revenge on this guy, but you're not strong enough yet. Go get stronger." So you do quests and busywork until the story reaches its next major point. At which point you're very likely to continue doing busy work for another large swath of time. The only thing that makes these MMO-style quests interesting is that you'll occasionally meet other AI adventurers working on the same quests as you. You can then team up to take the quest down. This can happen multiple times in one dungeon. In one particular case, I had four random AI teammates help out my normal squad of three. Our seven person mega-squad made quick work of the end boss. It's not game-changing, but it can give certain quests a more dynamic feeling.
The reason that Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll is a hard game to judge is because it's difficult to say that it could have been a better game. Given the resources they had to work with, I think the developer did an outstanding job of maximizing the output. It would have been much better, however, if they had realized the game was running long and trimmed it down. The final running time can be over forty hours, while the actual storyline probably only takes seven to twelve hours at most. A little side-questing and busy work is fine, but in this case, it is way over the top.
by Andrew Groen
