I don’t know how it is that Double Fine Productions manages to consistently produce fun little downloadable games after brief development cycles, but I wish they’d share the secret with the rest of the industry. Tim Schafer’s studio is known for their humorous, quirky jaunts that the masses don’t seem to be able to latch onto. It’s interesting then that they tackled two genres that are brimming with pedestrian “me too” efforts (tower defense and mech shooters) with Trenched. More intriguing still, is that the title is light on Double Fine shenanigans but still manages to be heavy in awesome gameplay.
The short but sweet campaign spans 15 missions set in an alternate WWI era history in which walking tanks known as “trenches” (mechs) and an evil army of television monsters (called tubes) are realities. These two elements came into being after war vets Frank Woodruff and Vladamir Farnsworth were bombarded with a communication known as “The Broadcast.” Naturally, they gain super-powered intellects as a result and then used them to pursue opposing goals.
Woodruff, whose legs were crushed by a tank during the war, creates the Mobile Trench Brigade to strengthen the U.S. army and put disabled soldiers back in action. Farnsworth, on the other hand, goes bonkers and gives birth to the Monovision — an army of TV beasties that serve him in his quest to spread The Broadcast. The two sides do battle and players join the fight as Trench pilots. There’s some comedic elements to the brief cut-scenes, but the game itself is a rather straightforward take on defending bases from atop mobile platforms. Straightforward, but really, really fun.
The biggest key to its success is the wide amount of customizable options that players can tool around with prior to jumping into battle. Your options will seem limited at first, but be patient and the unlocks will start flooding in faster than you can process them. In addition to acquiring new weapons and turrets through your actions on the battlefield, gamers can also jump into the store to buy and sell various wares.
Everything from trench size, color, player appearance, weapons, stationery emplacements, and special abilities can be tweaked to your liking. Prior to each battle, you’re given recommendations as to what sort of loadout the game thinks will be most efficient, but you can choose to completely ignore the advice if you wish. I found that following at least some of the guidelines usually leads to success, but I often performed better when mixing in my own preferences with one of the game’s suggestions.
As for the options themselves, the trench arsenal on hand is a deep mix of machine guns, grenade launchers, sniper rifles, artillery canons, shotguns, and satellite transmitters. Each of them is fun to wield, but they require different amounts of slots and different trench chassis have different numbers of slots. What some lack in gun slots, they make up for in turret capabilities.
You’ll have to decide for yourself if you want to be a towering beast of a trench that blasts the heck out of enemies from right in the thick of things, or if you prefer to carefully plant a plethora of turrets to do the bulk of the work for you. Either route provides for great fun and, no matter what your setup, you’ll find yourself frantically running around the map to defend the bases from waves of “tubes.” There’s also a lightning quick break between each onslaught and you’ll have to use this time to grab scrap metal (currency) that falls from the baddies and spend it on emplacements to bulk up your defenses. The tension is always high, but that’s part of the fun.
That being said, the game can occasionally feel a tad overwhelming in single player mode. That’s because you are extremely limited in the types of turrets you can deploy at once and how much ground you can cover — unless you want to completely sacrifice power and armor for turret variety and speed in every round. This makes things a bit too hectic and really makes it feel like the game was made with co-op in mind. That’s why I highly recommend you convince two or three of your friends to pick up the title and play along with you.
Trenched is an entirely different beast in multiplayer. With partners on your side, you can better prepare for all contingencies before jumping into the madness. However, no one player will be able to overpower the field of battle with their turrets in cooperative play; everyone has to share the spoils of war so there’s less scrap to go around. Even with that and the encumbrance of slightly more enemies in this mode, co-op just plays better.
On the downside, the framerate tends to take a major hit, especially in the latter stages, when you introduce more combatants into the mix. When playing with the MTB staff, it got so bad for our group in one level that the framerate wasn’t even chugging at points, it literally came to a standstill. The game looks pretty nice otherwise, with the drabness of most maps being overcome by the neon tubes and customized trenches. Still, it certainly would have benefited from less dull browns levels and more maps like the one in which you deploy into shallow water to defend some huts.
Another minor annoyance is the inability skip over cut-scenes. I had to sit through the same scene several times when I kept dying at a boss fight; that gets old in a hurry. Thankfully, the levels themselves are fun to replay multiple times; which is good, because there aren’t very many of them. It’s also difficult to gauge what you do and don’t already own when perusing the store.
Don’t let any of those small aggravations stop you from enjoying the simple pleasures of Trenched. The game hardly reinvents the tower-defense genre, but what’s on offer here is captivating gameplay that only gets better with friends and even includes some boss battles that mix things up by putting you on the offensive. Trenched is a lively take on the tower-defense genre that will put a smile on your face while it lasts.
[Images via Double Fine Productions.]
