"Life is either a great adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller
In the kingdom of Tripudia, things are not right. The normally lush and peaceful countryside has seen an uptick in vicious monsters. Young monster hunter Gladia ventures forth to investigate why, after her father is injured. It’s not long before she discovers the source to be a crashed zeppelin. The design hints at it coming from the neighboring kingdom of Maelon and it’s leaking Dolorum, a magical energy only found in Maelon. With this information, Gladia rushes to tell the Tripudia prime minister who plays down the crisis but vows to create a committee to investigate the crash site. Seeing that the prime minister is not fully interested in problem Gladia decides to go to Maelon herself and find out more.
If you find yourself curious to learn more about Gladia’s world, there are a lot of tie-ins to the original novel, Trulon: Shadow Gears, written by Johan Lillbacka and Jak Koke. It follows the adventures of Tripudian prince Neo and his friends. There is also a musical that was performed at the Finnish amusement park, Powerpark. The story for Trulon: The Shadow Engine stands on its own, but it's nice to know that if players wish to seek out more, they can.
"Adventure is worthwhile in itself." - Amelia Earhart
The gameplay for Trulon: The Shadow Engine has a slightly retro feel of traditional turn-based RPGs. You have a leveling system with equipment you can use for stat bonuses or additional magic effects such as stunning enemies with a successful hit or setting them on fire. The difference here is the combat is card based instead of action based. At the beginning of combat, you will draw your hand limit of cards, one wild card, and a default attack card. Your hand limit is based on your current character level. Everything is random except for the default attack card, which will be the same for each character.
You start with a small smattering of cards and gain more from winning battles, rewards for completing quests or finding some in hidden chests. Some cards will be character based, but many can be swapped in and out of various character decks. Learning the combat system is easy. The hard part is deciding what cards you should have in each character's deck. In combat, the draw is random so the more cards you have in a characters deck the less often the cards you need come up. For example, when your health is low you want your healer mage to be able to heal, but if they haven't drawn the cards yet, things may get a bit nerve wracking. The same can be said for the more powerful combat cards. Luck, it seems, has a heavy influence on the flow of combat. On the plus side if you are defeated the game drops you at the point just outside the encounter you lost. This allows you to go right back in and try again or go do something else.
"Sure, give me an adventure and I'll ride it." - Melissa Auf der Maur
The retro feel echoes throughout the look and sound of the game. Battle animations have a pixelated 16-bit era look that is juxtaposed over the static anime art of the story scenes. In the lands of Tripudia, everything is bright, lush, and colorful while in the neighboring kingdom of Maelon everything takes on a more downtrodden brown and industrialized gray tone.
Music helps reflect the character’s origin kingdom and teases with drama in the combat. Cheerful, upbeat, and happy melodies for Tripudia, while mournful and sad tones represent Maelon, and an energetic rock song plays while in combat. There is no voice acting, every conversation or story part is text based.
Overall
When I started Trulon: The Shadow Engine I wasn’t sure what I was in for, but soon enough I was exploring the world and enjoying the adventure. The story, coupled with the fact it has a real life musical, makes the game seem to be targeted to tweens, yet even I was delighting in it. It made me remember the enjoyment I had with old Final Fantasy, Lunar, and Phantasy Star games. Even combat, with its random element of luck, took on some elements of strategy when deciding what card to play, which cards to put in decks and even what stat or combat bonus items to equip. That thoughtful strategy element does come into play when the difficulty curve of enemies takes some serious spikes up as you play through the game. Your options are to get lucky or grind it out in the overworld map hoping to find random encounters to help level yourself up. And it should be noted, random encounters are few and far between, so have whatever lucky token you swear by sitting in your lap.
Now for the bad news, when “it” happened. The game breaking glitch.
At about the five-hour mark, one of the side quests I was on froze the game. I'm in combat, the music is playing, my characters and the enemy are lined up ready to go, but no cards are drawn. I have no controls. I can't even get to the options menu. So I do the only thing I can, drop to the Xbox home screen and quit the game there. I restart the game, pick my save file, and damn it. The game autosaved right at the beginning of the encounter so I can't back out of it and move on.
A quick search of forums and websites show that this is a known bug in the game. KYY Games is aware, but for now, advise everyone to ignore the side quest. The worst part is that particular side quest is also tied to a secret achievement. So while you could avoid the quest and finish the game you still won't "finish" the game completely. Not to mention those of us who have put in quite a few hours into the game already, only to have to start over and play through everything again. It was fun the first time, but it's lost a little something the second time, plus now there is the worry of, will this happen again with a different quest?
In the end, I want to finish the game and I do hope KYY Games fixes it soon, but the glitch casts a dark pall over the game. Enjoyable, but currently broken I give Trulon: The Shadow Engine a 3 out of 5 for now, with the option to bump up the score if the game gets fixed.
For more information check out the official Trulon: The Shadow Engine website.
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