Game Review: Dream Trigger 3D

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

For: Nintendo 3DS

From: Art Co. Ltd./D3Publisher of America

ESRB Rating: Everyone (mild fantasy violence)

Price: $40

At first glance, "Dream Trigger 3D" looks like the fresh and totally bananas game some of us have been waiting for since the Nintendo 3DS launched with a lineup full of safe sequels and retreads.

At first play, the game seems absolutely impossible - a ridiculous mix of old-school shooter, "Lumines" and "Rez" that appears punishingly hard even on its very first level.

Upon subsequent playthroughs, though, the pieces that comprise the madness reveal their intricacies, and "Trigger" turns into a manageably frantic game with some unique ideas.

Unfortunately, that quickly leads to a whole new and wholly surprising problem: Is "Trigger," which initially felt fresh and brutally imposing, really just shallow and way too easy instead?

It's hard to translate "Trigger's" methods into words that do it justice, but let's try.

On "Trigger's" top screen is your spaceship, which you control with either the joystick or D-pad. Surrounding you, along with the occasional power-up, are blips of light that are enemies who can attack you but are, in that incarnation, invincible.

To make them vulnerable, you have to use the touch screen, which functions like a radar screen and illustrates your invisible enemies as dots on a map. Drawing over those dots, and letting the "Lumines"-like sonar bar run over your scribbles, makes them visible on the top screen, where your ship is now free to blast them into oblivion.

Here's the catch: Your ship only shoots forward, so you have to come into direct contact with each enemy to destroy it. The counter-catch, is that while your ship is firing, it's invincible. Your ship can fire for only so long until it's vulnerable again, and the best way to recharge your firepower is to continually expose new enemies with sonar.

Throw all those catches and conditions into one pot, turn the speed up, set the whole thing to a complementary musical beat and place it in front of various scrolling backgrounds that take terrific advantage of the 3DS' 3D capabilities, and "Trigger" is an exciting exercise in managing two planes of activity at once.

Problem is, once you figure out the science behind it all, "Trigger" doesn't throw any curveballs or do anything to meaningfully enhance it. There's the appearance of a lot of content inside the box - a 55-level quest mode, free play, time attack, in-game achievements, two-player local wireless co-op and competitive multiplayer. But outside of aesthetics, little about the game changes from one level to another, and if you can beat the first level, you almost certainly can beat the last.

Perhaps most troubling is "Trigger's" tendency to crash the 3DS entirely when the 3D slider is on - a rather significant issue, considering this is one of the better visual implementations thus far of the new system's most prominent new feature.

Is this the game's fault or the system's firmware's fault? Is this fixable with a patch? Are patches even possible on the 3DS? And if they are, does this mean the 3DS has joined the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in the unfortunate age of the patch? Time will tell, but there's nothing comforting about these early findings, and it's impossible to recommend purchase of a game that, at least for now, is prone to these breakdowns.

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