Thank you Big Sugar for the review code!

Trifox bills itself as a “twin-stick action adventure” that’s “inspired by the golden age of 3D platformers” (from the ‘90s), and the game does have a very ‘90s feel to it. Minimal story, an anthropomorphic animal “mascot” character you play as, different environments— even the level select screen looks quite similar to the “hub” in many Crash Bandicoot games, with portals taking you to the different locations. However, despite the description talking about it being a 3D platformer, if you go in thinking you’ll be doing a lot of jumping and dodging in that sense, you’re going to be surprised. This is, by far, a top-down combat game, with some simple pressure-pad puzzles and a few short, straightforward platforming segments; platforming makes up 5-10% of this game at most and isn’t particularly challenging. It’s the combat aspects you’ll spend the most time on.

For much of the game, you’ll be entering different environments and fighting enemies, using abilities from one of three different skillsets (hence the name “Trifox”). You can equip your unnamed fox character with various special abilities from either a warrior, a mage, or a gunner. You don’t unlock these special abilities by “leveling up” as you do in RPGs, but rather by breaking crates and pots in the main levels, which are bursting with coins you can pick up. Back at your home base, you can then select the next ability to purchase and equip it on your character, assigning it to any one of the four shoulder buttons. (There is also a dash button for each skillset unlocked from the start, and though the speed/range of each is slightly different, they still accomplish the same thing.) Stronger abilities, as you would expect, are more expensive and are locked behind purchasing the weaker, cheaper abilities beforehand.

If you decide to go down the warrior route, you’ll be slashing and hacking your way through your enemies with quite a bit of health—though you won’t have many ranged attacks, even if some of your most powerful attacks can do area-of-effect damage. For gunners, you have a bit less health, and all of your weaponry is long-range—you have a default machine gun on your back, but can also deploy various temporary turrets to take care of your enemies, or send out drones. With the mage, you have the least health, but your… weaponry is entirely long range, and… you can send out magic helpers to help you take down enemies—wait, that sounds familiar. Why IS there a mage class? You basically play the same as a mage as you would as a gunner. The appearance is the only real differing factor, and in fact your abilities tend to be weaker. For example, with the gunner your default machine gun fires straight out at the target, but with the mage your default spells kind of curl around, hitting your enemies less predictably. A mage is basically a less effective and weaker gunner, and judging from the trophy completion rates (there are trophies for beating levels with certain skill sets), it seems like I’m not the only one who noticed this—the mage is by far the least-selected class.

Alternately, to help compensate for your class weaknesses, there’s nothing stopping you from just taking a little from the warrior class, a bit from the gunner class, and the like, with your character’s outfit getting mixed up a bit as you combine skills. It’s a rather fun mechanic, not only being confined to one particular class at a time, and I loved combining my favorite abilities to truly be devastating.

Although it may at first take a bit getting used to using only the shoulder buttons for combat in a top-down game like this, once you do the game is at its best. (At least with a controller—this game really requires two joysticks to play effectively, so I wouldn’t recommend buying this on PC unless you have a gamepad to plug in.) The combat is supremely satisfying, with different tactics required for a variety of enemies. The enemies range from little melee crabs to twirling swordsmen to massive buff anthropomorphic wolves that can slam down their spiked shields to even piloted mechs that fire off bursts of missiles—and that’s not even counting the bosses, of which there are some “surprise” mini-bosses in some levels in addition to the predictable boss level at the end of each “world”. Often unique mixes of enemies will require you to use your abilities in a different manner; with spinning swordsmen coming at you, you may want to back off the hack-and-slash and use your turrets or machine guns, but rapidly spawning slime monsters that multiply when you kill them may require you to get up close and personal. In what order should you take down these enemies using your specific assigned abilities? That’s for you to decide.

All of this said, although the game may start out simple enough, even on the easy difficulty things get very difficult by the final world. The final boss is absolutely chaotic, and there’s so much going on on-screen sometimes it can be difficult to take it all in. Beyond easy, there are medium, hard, and—after you beat the game once—crazy difficulties. The only difference between the difficulties appears to be the amount of damage you take, which is based on an RPG-like bar, and not a more platformer-esque concrete number of hits. Luckily the checkpoints (for the most part) are generous, and if you die you usually don’t respawn too far back in the level. (Even if you fail at the few platforming segments, you’ll just respawn a jump or two back with a minor health deduction, making them even simpler than they otherwise would be.) That said, given how many times I died and how much damage some of the tougher enemies can dish out, I can’t imagine enjoying this game at anything higher than a “normal” difficulty level—it can get grueling now and then.

One thing that is surprising about the game is that, for a $20 price point, it’s awfully short. There are only three worlds with 3 “normal” levels and a boss level in each, and then a final boss level. There’s also a very short introductory section at the beginning to help you get used to the controls. The normal levels tend to take one between 10-30 minutes for the most part, with the longest getting around 40 minutes long (though don’t worry if you can’t finish a level in one sitting, if you exit the game while in a level you’ll continue from your last checkpoint). And that’s if you’re trying to smash all the crates and get everything; if you’re just blasting your way through a level, you’ll get through it in considerably less time. Just to show you how short this game can be, there’s a trophy for getting your total level time under 3 hours, which is not that tall of an order. Adding a couple more worlds would’ve helped justify the price point, or adding more replayability—the only reason to go back to a level beyond improving your time is to find a couple of hidden crystals, but these crystals do nothing for your abilities and don’t unlock anything. They’re merely there if you want to get a few trophies by getting all of them.

The graphics are fairly simple and kind of low-poly, with much of the shading being rather simple—this isn’t a game that’s going to astound your senses. Especially up-close during the cutscenes, the game honestly looks a bit ugly, but thankfully the camera is usually far enough away you don’t notice this. Speaking of the cutscenes, they’re completely unneeded. The entire story is just that a bad guy steals your TV remote, and you set out to get it back. I get it, it’s a callback to the ‘90s platformer games, that’s really all that’s needed, but there are repetitive unskippable cutscenes a couple of times a world where a news report comes up to remind you that, yes, the villain (or one of his underlings) still has your remote. Given that there is no spoken dialogue beyond gibberish, and no subtitles that aren’t gibberish either, there seems to be no point to this. Quit stretching out the threadbare plot and let me get back to the game, please.

To finish up a couple of loose ends, the game sounds do the job and are convincing, but aren’t particularly spectacular. The music is not bad, but usually low-key and supremely forgettable. What is annoying is that there are a couple of game glitches that seem to indicate it’s not been completely finished/optimized. When moving quickly, the frame rate can not only stutter, but outright freeze for a second or two, only for the game to continue to go on “behind the scenes”. Most of the time you’re moving quickly, it’s because you’re going through one of the platforming segments or you’re dodging through a lot of enemies. Thus, these huge frame stutters happen at the absolute worst times and should have been patched, especially since I played this game a few months after its release—these aren’t release day glitches, here. A trophy or two is glitched too, though completely exiting and re-starting the game seems to take care of them.

I don’t usually mention multiplayer if it’s not included, but given the kind of game this is (top-down combat using a variety of abilities against rooms full of enemies, character customization, your character taking up a relatively small chunk of the screen), it’s disappointing and downright baffling multiplayer was not included, as only a few small tweaks would have needed to be made to the core mechanics. This is exactly the type of game that would be great for couch co-op, and it’s sadly not present.

Morally, there are few issues with Trifox. You are shooting, hacking at, and killing enemies, but there’s no blood—your enemies just keel over and fade out of existence after a few seconds, and only blink slightly when they’re taking damage. As mentioned earlier, you can play as a mage (and there are some mage enemies and a mage boss), but beyond the mage boss chanting some gibberish that draws power from some glowing crystals, there’s no explanation of how this magic works, and the mages even have your stereotypical “dunce cap with stars” mage hat on—it's all very fairy-tale like, with no real occult overtones. Given that there’s no language spoken, there’s no profanity, either.

Overall, when you’re in the thick of it, Trifox can be a really fun game. With a variety of abilities and enemies, finding your own playstyle to take down a variety of bad guys is quite fun, and never lost its charm, at least for me—most of the gameplay mechanics seem quite balanced. That said, the mage class is the exception to this fine-tuning, the game is quite short for the price, replayability is almost nil, there’s no multiplayer, and the annoying frame-rate hiccups can detract from the experience and send you to an unexpected death at times. If you can find the game on discount for half off or more, I would buy it if you enjoy such combat games. Otherwise, you can skip Trifox without really feeling you’ve missed anything huge.