Trials of Topoq review (PlayStation 3)

So you’ve bought a nice new PlayStation Eye camera. Besides getting all creative with your own videos recorded from the top of your TV, there’s not a lot you can do with it. Unless you’ve bought Eye of Judgment with it, there’s little point in trying it with your old EyeToy games (trust me), so along comes the PlayStation Network to offer us a few quick fix games for us to amuse ourselves and our new camera with. Trials of Topoq will set you back a measly £3.49, but should we have spent the money on beer (we bought both)?

The game puts you in control of a ball that has to make its way down various towers while smashing open cages and avoiding ‘dangers’ in an attempt to get to the plughole-esque goal at the base of one of the towers. Kind of. In actual fact, in pure PlayStation Eye (Toy?) style, you’re actually just projected on the platforms of each tower, and by moving around, waving your arms or whatever jive-hands motion you can happily perform you raise parts of the platform to push your ball (still with me?) where it wants to go.

Trials and Tactics

There are five towers to choose from, each progressively more difficult than the last, with six levels in each for 30 in total. Some require you to simply navigate the areas without falling off, and some are more tricky with catapults firing you off to different areas and large ramps for you to roll the ball down with pinpoint accuracy to avoid whatever monsters lay in wait on the surface. Interestingly all of the towers can be selected from the start, leaving very little persuasion for you to go out of your way to play them all. The only progression or challenge seems to be to beat the pre-set scores on the leaderboard, or that of your friends that may have played the game on the same PS3, so that your photo replaces them at the top of the pile for each tower.

While moving over the actual ball achieves very little, other than raising it up, the real technique seems to be moving to the side opposite your desired movement direction, and slowly tracking the balls movement with your arms to build up more speed. It seems remarkably accurate considering our Eye Toy experience in the past; obviously the increase in frame rate and resolution has seriously improved the motion detection ratio. Crazily, one of the most interesting moments for me was the title menu, where you choose your options by touching the spinning list and dragging it where you want it. Remarkably accurate and reminiscent of Minority Report even in my poorly lit room.

Scores and improvements

To achieve better scores you must obviously avoid the dangers (although your ball will respawn if you hit one), complete the tower more quickly and smash as many cages as possible. While it all sounds quite simple, as soon as they start throwing surfaces that tilt themselves back and forth it becomes a frantic game of trying to keep your ball from falling that shows off the accuracy of the PlayStation Eye, and isn’t that just what you’d expect from an accessory’s launch ‘title’.

Hardly a game that can be shared with multiple players without taking turns, or watching you move around like an idiot, the game gives its pleasure from the quirkiness of the situation, and in some ways the presentation of yourself within the game world. It’s a shame that there seems little purpose to play on if you’re the only person that’s going to see your high scores, but it’s a well presented, hardly revolutionary in terms of graphics, quietly entertaining product that few will be upset at shelling out a few quid for.

And that’s about it. The game barely changes its basic principles except to throw a few more complicated yet cleverly designed challenges at you, to the classical sounds of the mix of calming altitudinal winds and the relaxing music. Trials of Topic is simple enough for anyone to understand and get into, but the physical lateral thinking of sometimes approaching a platform where your image is rotated before the camera angle catches up can sometimes cause confusion, but rarely frustration.

Your girlfriend might like it, your mum might even like it, but with all of the excellent games coming out on all platforms over this holiday season we reckon it’s only worth a quick play through to justify to yourself why you spent the cash to buy the newest version of the EyeToy.