Despite the massive success of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, very few games have attempted to provide a similar open world pirate adventure. King of Seas developer 3DClouds, who mostly makes licensed racing games, has decided to take another crack at this with Trident’s Tale. The results, while better than one might expect, are a bit of a mixed bag, filled with dated, incredibly generic graphics, subpar side content, and ship combat that’s far too simple and basic to come close to providing the same sense of adventure Black Flag did so many years ago.
Trident’s Tale puts players in the boots of a young woman named Ocean. Little too on the nose there, don’t you think? Ocean lives with her adopted father who is abducted by a pirate looking to steal pieces of a mystical trident that will give her power of the sea. It’s incredibly basic stuff, to be sure, but that’s acceptable for a game. What’s less acceptable are the game’s writing and cutscene animations. The dialogue is cringey and childish in equal measure. The animations during cutscenes are also horrible, with robotic, awkward animation cycles repeating instead of actually being animated.
What’s more, there was clearly no attempt to lipsync any of the dialogue, as characters just flap their gums at set intervals. Making matters worse is the game’s atrocious voice acting. It’s been a while since I’ve heard such bad acting in a game. 3DClouds is an Italian developer, but they would have been better served hiring Italian vocal talent instead of the grab-bag of mostly far-below-par English-speaking actors they hired. The game’s line delivery is typically stunningly bad across the board. Combined with the writing and animations, the cutscenes are simply incredibly poor.
This also extends to the game’s graphics. Trident’s Tale has the most generic art direction I think I’ve ever seen. All the character designs and models remind me of a CGI show made for toddlers. Ocean, for instance, looks more like an irrelevant NPC than a protagonist. The first time I saw the navy soldiers, who look like they were ripped out of modern Bob the Builder, I nearly burst out laughing. The entire cast is just painfully cookie-cutter in terms of their visual designs. Plus the game just looks quite awful. It’s blurry, too foggy, and the water looks terrible. It’s all quite unfortunate.
Thankfully, once you get past the presentation, Trident’s Tale isn’t actually bad at all. Ocean has both light and heavy attack combos. Landing melee hits charges up power you can use for pistol shots and skills that you acquire from adding new crew members. She can also dodge, which mercifully allows her to cancel out of her attack animations, something you’ll need since the enemies are more aggressive than you might expect. I really wish there was a block or parry, though, as the simplistic combat would have benefited from these massively. Overall, the combat is fine. You mash the attack button, dodge, and use skills on the game’s smallish variety of enemies until they die.
Skills are mostly interchangeable and tend to just give you an area of effect around Ocean. The one I used the most heals Ocean for a chunk of life, damages enemies, and applies a status effect. This skill is so useful that I didn’t ever have to use potions that you can get either buy purchasing or crafting them. Yeah, there’s a crafting system. Aside from potions, you’ll find blueprints for gear for both Ocean and her ship that can each be crafted to level 3. Materials can be picked up from all over, as well as found in chests. The issue with all the gear is that most of it isn’t different enough to require you to change to anything in the first place, which is a bit of waste.
But the most attractive aspect of Trident’s Tale is the sailing. Ocean gets a ship at the start of the game and you can hop on it and sail anywhere you want. The ship has three different speeds, but none feel particularly fast. Turning on the highest speed is also painfully slow. Sailing doesn’t necessarily control badly, but it could have felt better. Ship combat is pretty much just the ship combat from the very beginning of Black Flag, but while that game had excellent ship progression, including new weapon types and stronger enemy ships, this game only has side cannons, front cannons, and ship versions of Ocean’s skills.
It all just feels far too simple, resulting in a missed opportunity. The game very clearly borrows much of these aspects from Black Flag, but does next to nothing with them. Plus, aiming and firing the cannons at ships doesn’t feel all that good. You can pick fights with any ships you see on the ocean, but they’re mostly all the same. After getting their health down by two-thirds, you can board them, but this is just a single button press that usually gets you a tiny bit of money instead of actually having you board the ship.
At least there are a good number of islands in the game’s world, including settlements and smaller, uninhabited places. Everything has something to find, whether it be crafting materials or money (which isn’t really useful at all.) The design of the islands themselves is actually quite good and they’re varied enough that they don’t get too repetitive before the credits roll. There are even little puzzles guarding chests that you can find on various islands.
Trident’s Tale‘s main quest is pretty standard stuff that sees you fighting, platforming, and even solving some puzzles in the game’s temples. It all did a decent enough job of keeping me interested along the way, even if the temples are a bit too samey. There are even a good amount of boss fights which can be pretty sharp. Unfortunately, a few of them are badly balanced and take far too long. The final boss fight is pretty easy, but it’s made frustrating by the fact that the boss can straight-up one-hit kill you.
Another one of the game’s biggest problems is that its collision detection is not the best to say the least. Your ship can get stuck when trying to leave a dock because it’s too close to invisible walls and can’t move. Freeing it is awkward and hearing the ship grind against an invisible wall is obnoxious. It’s also not uncommon to see Ocean enter an awkward animation when landing on surfaces with no collision texture, and landing in certain places can be really stuttery, as she can have trouble actually landing on the ground. Jumping is awkward too and feels unresponsive, while many of the jumps that require Ocean to grab a ledge require more precision than the game comfortably allows.
The game has side quests as well. If an exclamation point appears on the map, it usually means you can recruit a new follower. All followers do is grant new skills, upgraded by finding grog in chests and receiving it as quest rewards. There are a handful of other side quests, but I didn’t do these solely because they aren’t marked on the map. They often require you to search every inch of the world to find things with zero direction. There are also treasure maps you can use to find buried treasure, but these want you to figure out location points on your map that you’re supposed to find by reading the zoomed in treasure map pieces. It’s odd that the devs decided to hide content away like this, especially since the main story can be beaten in nine or ten hours.
Despite its incredibly poor presentation, Trident’s Tale isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t really try to do anything with its gameplay, a pattern that doesn’t change or develop past the game’s intro. If you just want a cartoony game where you can sail and do a bit of pirating, it’s not a bad time, but it’s fairly mediocre, sometimes unpolished, and too repetitive to really offer much to anyone who wanted a cartoony version of Black Flag.
Trident's Tale: Ugly and incredibly basic, Trident's Tale is decently fun to play but won't do much to impress or inspire. – Andrew Farrell
Here’s our previous review:
