Some thoughts on 'Trigger Time', a story-driven top-down shooter featuring a gravity gun

I took a look at Trigger Time [Steam], a story-driven top-down shooter that released with Linux support this month and it went under the radar. As of right now, it only has two reviews from people who got it for free. It's a shame it's gone so unnoticed, as it's pretty decent.


Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.

You play as an unnamed Marine storming the fortress of an evil Professor who's creating mechanical weapons. Your commander sent a team ahead of you, but you've lost contact. Pretty standard stuff as far as story goes, with simple writing so it's nothing special there.

While the game doesn't do much that's massively different to other top-down shooters, it does have one feature to make it stand out: a gravity gun. This one feature makes the game actually a lot of fun, to grab an enemy and launch it towards a bunch of other mechanical beasts and watch them all blow up — glorious. Getting swarmed? No problem, grab the nearest exploding barrel and launch it into the middle of them all and watch the fireworks.

There's an interesting amount of variety on offer in the levels too, from intense swarms of smaller robots with long-range laser units to all kinds of crazy stuff. It's not just about the enemies, but environmental hazards that you face too. Massive rotating saw-blades are a thing too.

While it's mainly a top-down action game, it does have minor puzzle elements and horror sections too. One bit took me completely by surprise to the point that it sent a shiver down my spine.
Pretty safe to say the second proper mission really made me appreciate the game, as it became really quite intense. The fear levels over here rose pretty quickly, especially with the music. Which is another surprising point of the game, the music design is actually very well suited to each section of the game. Action elements are beefed up with faster, heavier music, while tense moments like the above picture has extremely creepy audio. Honestly, that second mission was really damn good.

During the missions you can earn blue coins, which can be spent on one-time upgrades per-level. So you could save a bunch up to buy an extra life, armour, more ammo and so on. There's not a great variety on what to spend your hard earned coins on, but it's there if you need it.

There's even boss battles too, but they aren't particularly challenging. They have a limited set of attacks and paths so you end up learning the patterns and dealing with them without too much trouble. A nice touch though, to help round-off each level.

While the game is fun, for a top-down shooter it doesn't really give me a feeling of being fast paced. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's mainly down to the slow character movement that it ends up almost feeling sluggish with the pace. It's fun for sure, but a little faster movement speed for your character and the enemies would have helped.

My main issue is the fact that you cannot save the game during the missions and considering the size of the levels it can be an issue. The missions can take a good 15 minutes each to complete, so they're not exactly short. It would have been nice to have some form of in-level saving to come back to it if you need to. You either go through an entire mission, or wait until you have time to do it.

Performance wise it's absolutely solid, zero issues. Very smooth without a hint of stutter. Stupidly high frame-rates on my 980ti, but the game isn't heavy graphically so that's not surprising.



Issues

The game has really crap multi-monitor support. Setting a 1920x1080 resolution in full-screen results in the game trying to go in the middle of my two monitors, cutting off half of the game. This is a fantastic way to annoy me, because not enough developers test it. I was forced to find the config files to unset full-screen as I wasn't able to adjust it again in-game due to it being cut off.

The Steam Controller worked out of the box, but the default config was a bit of a mess with the right pad. No amount of tinkering was able to make the aiming work well. It would likely work well in Mouse mode, but since I was forced to play in windowed mode due to the above issue the mouse mode kept moving my cursor outside the game. Keyboard & Mouse controls feel tight and responsive though, so it's not a massive issue.

Also, at least one of the sounds they used in-game were copyrighted, woops. Rookie mistake, but it seems that has been sorted now.

Final thoughts

Overall, it doesn't do a great deal different, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a solid top-down shooter and it's really fun, which is what counts the most. The gravity gun is especially cool and can really save your hide when you're getting swarmed. A good few twists and the number of times I thought I knew what was coming to be completely surprised was great.

You can find Trigger Time on Steam. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.