We decided to review the CO-OP game Tristoy which was released on January 15th, 2015. The game is a 2D platform side-scroller that would fit in the metroidvania category. It combines jump and run elements with combat action. This Steam game can be played online or in a local network and is strictly for two players. The developer is Uniworlds Game Studios and the publisher is Merge Games / Headup Games. Merge Games is also quite known for Monaco: What’s yours is mine.
Tristoy features the free Uniplay app for Android and iOS, which turns your smartphone or tablet into a controller that connects via your local Wi-Fi network.
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The game takes place in Tristoy, an ancient fortress in the middle of the Sea of Shards. In this setting you can choose between Prince Freedan who is a warrior character and the Wizard Stayn who plays more of a support/stun kind of role. The enemy in this non-linear story is the witch Ink whose dungeon you both have to escape from.
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The game mainly contains a lot of puzzles and fight sequences that you can only solve together. Stayn only stuns opponents and Freedan has to kill them afterwards by kicking them. After some time he gets a sword. Now he can slay enemies with a simple hit or combo. The double-jump is another of Freedan’s abilities. Stayn also helps solving those interactive puzzles by using his gyromatic feature to control the environment. Teamwork is the key in those passages and delivering solutions to these puzzles together with a friend can be quite entertaining. The best feature of Stayn is definitely that he cannot die. Sadly this is only true for the first few levels where he stays in his ghost form. After defeating a certain boss Stayn becomes a living character who can get damage and dies just like Freedan. The cool idea that one player is invincible and the other one is somewhat weak is destroyed after Stayn returns from the dead. His new form is just lame. He carries a huge stone that can become a platform for Freedan to jump upon. This stone can also be thrown at enemies to kill them or Stayn can become the stone and crush enemies from above. When there is a bigger distance between the two characters the game switches to a mobile split screen which creates a good overview for the players.
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The games biggest weakness is definitely the controls. Playing with the keyboard is okay but you cannot customize the keys. Controlling the game with the smartphone or tablet app Uniplay is a great idea but it is executed poorly. The controls are not very precise and your character often does not perform the actions you had in mind. The best alternative is using a gamepad but when playing with the analog control sticks we had the same lack of preciseness as with the Uniplay app. Sometimes when you go forward or face long jumps interruptions can occur and the character comes to a stand still or falls down. This changes completely when we switched to the digital control pad. There everything went just fine.
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As we said above the story is non-linear. The players can change the story by talking to each other and selecting one of the many multiple choice possibilities. The players may also decide what happened to Freedan and Stayn previous to the game. The atmosphere is rather average and boring the background graphics are not really astonishing and they do not change much. The music is just annoying.
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The game has no single player so you definitely have to play with a friend who is at your home or with a Steam friend. The reason for that is that there is nobody in the online lobby to play with we tested it multiple times and at different times. The game also is rather buggy. We experienced a silly bug spawning at a checkpoint. All in all I would not recommend spending around 20€ for this game because there are better 2D side-scrollers out there. Solving the puzzles with a friend can be funny but the controls are frustrating. The great ideas that the developers had were not well executed.
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Tested and written by Lias Kudla