Some player-built plots are boring, but others are wildly inventive. One of the main attractions of Trove is that it scatters homesite plots all throughout the generated worlds you visit, and you can place your own home on any one of these that's open and use it to refill potions or craft new items. You don't get a lot of room for building your house, but that's because Trove lets you move it anywhere you wish.
That Minecraft look isn't just for show-you can travel throughout the world collecting blocks of different colors with which to make your own home, as well as special blocks that allow the use of tools such as a loot collector that unlocks new appearances for gear and weapons and grants materials to upgrade other gear. That’s annoying, especially in a game that's so fond of jumping puzzles.īut fortunately, Trove isn't just about fighting.
Most of the time it plays well enough, but sometimes I'd found myself rubberbanded back into a barrage of fireballs in a dungeon that I was sure I'd avoided. But that's not always the case, as strange performance issues pop up, especially at peak hours. Such a statement should imply that Trove's simple looks make for a technically smooth experience.
And, naturally, it all looks like a huge Minecraft project. The procedural generation creates a hodgepodge of different styles for each zone, which means you might be trotting on your free starter mount through a candyland with hostile birthday cakes one second and immediately slip into a Tron-like futurescape where purplish light races up through crevasses in metallic structures the next.
The loot's even fun to look at because most pieces are made by players of the PC version that’s been around since 2015, allowing the aesthetic to shift from rather appropriate Viking helmets to burgers perched ridiculously atop one's head, because why not? Early on, the settings for these loot hunts are almost as visually entertaining as the loot itself. Each new piece has the potential to boost your damage or resistances by a significant amount, and Trove keeps the hunt fun by even working in boosts to your ability to jump for longer, which helps with the jumping puzzles around many dungeons.
If loot grinds appeal to you, so will Trove, at least in the early hours when the experience is fresh and the environments unfamiliar. Seconds after the throwaway cutscene it casts you into a hub that becomes your eternal starting point for every login, and from there it's all about leaping through portals into procedurally generated zones peppered with dungeons and bosses ready to scatter loot. It seems to think of itself as an MMORPG with Minecraft trappings, but in structure, it owes far greater debts to Diablo 3's Adventure Mode than World of Warcraft. No, Trove is more interested in loot than storytelling.