Urk Reviews... Troll Over 18-Jan-15

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Urkelbot666
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Urk Reviews... Troll Over 18-Jan-15

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Troll Over! As a longtime admirer of bad puns, I felt obligated to give this one a play :)
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First Impressions
Nice opening theme song, simplistic title screen. Pleasing to the eyes and ears :) I found the graphical style of the NPCs world map fairly amusing, and well done, with a somewhat distinct style. Cartoony and stylized.
I loved the music on the main map, and found it bopping through my head after I had played.

The story setup is pretty sparse, but fun. We are introduced to a troll who we are asked to name, wander around a bit until stumbling across the sleeping body of a naked man. Upon waking up the man is revealed to have lost his memory, we are prompted to name him.
The Troll takes advantage of the man's lost memory, telling him that he is part of the Troll's gang and that he should tag along with Troll. I like that our hero in this story is a bastard.
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Gameplay
The game mechanics are pretty standard here. Normal RPG stuff, walk around, examine/use stuff, battle. I wasn't sure about the storyline while I was playing, but the maps were linear enough that I was able to progress without trouble.
The battles took a little bit for me to get used to, figuring out which of the Troll's attacks to use on which enemies. There are some helpful NPC's that give you some tips about what to bash, smash, and thrash. I wasn't ever able to run from any battles, I only tried a few times, but each time I was told that "Trolls don't run!" and I missed the chance to get an attack in, so I stopped trying, and just battled till I died. Thankfully that only happened once or twice at first.
I spent a little bit of time grinding so that I wouldn't have to worry about getting killed. The battles are pretty quick, and it was easy enough to gain a few levels. The in battle graphics were somewhat interesting, they were enlarged versions of the walkabout graphics, which I thought was kind of a neat idea. It game the game a different feel stylistically than I was used to. However some of the enemy graphics left a bit to be desired in terms of detail and color.
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Most of the game involved getting into little fights and going on little quests. The first time I played through, I didn;t find most of these quests, and ended up getting obliterated by the final boss! When I played through again, I explored more, got some new playable characters and Items. One of the mini-quests involved hitting switches on a wall that lit up markers on stones to open up a secret passage. I honestly have no Idea how this worked. I just brute forced until things happened.
The battles occur in a mixture of NPC encounters, and random encounters in tall grass. The tall grass was great for leveling up. Many of the screens provided multiple paths from which the player can choose to either go through grass and fight random battles, or fight the enemies they can see.
The game has an interesting element that each map is a single screen. these are all linked together in such a way that this mechanic works fine for the game. Each screen is designed interestingly and none look sparse or unbalanced.
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In Conclusion

A pretty fun if short game, clocking in under 90 minutes of play for me. There isn't too much story of which to speak, but there are some plot elements toward the end that tie things up a bit. This is more one to play for a time killer than for engaging story and gameplay.
A complaint I did have was with the battle music. It seems to be several short and unrelated chiptune jingles strung together. It made the battle experience a bit odd at times.
I would like to have seen a bit more story here, and some more dialogue to maybe flesh out some of the humor that is here. I felt that there was more potential for silliness than was capitalized upon in the few dialogues with NPCs and in the 2 endings I got, one of which seemed oddly dark at the end compared with the more innocent humor up to that point.
I'd recommend this for a short time killer. It's a game that can be experienced in under 2 hours, and in a short time, I got 2 plays through it.
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