The Troll and I - Review (Nintendo Switch)

The Troll and I was a game that I was really looking forward to and when the kind folks over at Maximum Games sent me a copy for the Nintendo Switch I was quite excited. I had seen some clips online and loved what I saw, the whole idea of the game was intriguing to me, the crafting elements, the open world even the story sounded brilliant on paper and from the trailers that had been released.

However, upon playing an hour of the game, in which I struggled to get that far, the game is an absolute mess. The game stutters with constant framerate issues which made my eyes go funny at one point and I had to turn the game off. I’ve fallen through the world and got stuck, the game has lost its bearings and when I was meant to be going on a certain path to escape the village at the beginning, but the game decided to take me through a few mountains before killing me against the side of the tree. The third and final nail in the coffin for me was that while walking around the world getting some spears a random loading screen appeared and I got stuck there. When pressing the + button on the Switch I could hear the menu come up in the background and I could hear the distinct ping when moving from option to option.



The game isn’t the best looker and this isn’t helped by the constant stuttering. When pressing X to get resources there is a delay to this happening. The main thing that has upset me most about this is that where is the QA testing? How has a game in this state been allowed to be released? It’s not as though it’s a one off, after checking Metacritic for reviews on the Xbox and PlayStation version they are pretty much the same, with the game averaging 39%. Being honest, this is no better than an early PS2 game. Terrible

Surely this should have been a wakeup call for the devs to get themselves into gear to get it sorted. A lot of gamers do base their opinion on whether to get a game by looking at reviews and going by what this game has scored, there won’t be many of those games who would have got the game.



I am eternally grateful for being provided the code and given the chance at reviewing this game, but the state it is currently in, it’s unscorable. I don’t think I’ve played a game before that is in such a poor state.

This review is a lot shorter than our normal, but there isn’t really anything that we can say about the game other than what is above. If a patch is released for the game for it to be in a playable form, I will revisit this review, but as stated above, this game is currently unscorable.