I’ve played some bad games this year, but this may well be the most disappointing.

Picture the scene: you’re handed the license to make a Trollhunters video game. A game based off one of the finest fantasy animated series around from the mind of Guillermo Del Toro. The possibilities are endless: this is a true open goal for a great video game: 3D collectathon around Arcadia and Trollmarket, Beat ‘em up, Zelda-lite... Anything, but this.

What we actually have is a bare basic 2D platformer, probably developed many years ago, dragged out of the cupboard, dusted off, asset changed and voila. One ready-made piece of shit. It would be bad enough on its own: using the Trollhunters name and with links to all the Tales of Arcadia, it’s a travesty.

Aesthetics was the one area you thought they couldn’t mess up and yet they’ve managed it. While the characters look... fine, albeit very shiny, the level backgrounds are generic and lifeless. I daresay Del Toro would have been devastated had he seen it himself. One exception to this is Trollmarket itself, though the time and effort spent designing the background here makes the limited area you can explore more frustrating.

In the audio department, the music seems to be taken directly from the show, so while it doesn’t always match the on-screen action, it’s pleasant enough. They also have most of the original voice actors involved in the audio department. However, these are not paired to cutscenes: the story being told through (mostly voiced) textboxes, sadly no Kelsey Grammar though they did get David Bradley to reprise his role as Merlin.

How does it play, you ask? Well, it functions. It does get slightly more involved as it goes along with situational summons, a dash and a ranged attack, but ultimately, it’s still: hold right, press jump when you see a gap or higher ledge and press attack when you see an enemy. When puzzles present themselves, there is zero thought or depth required: green box – dash through it; ledge too high – summon Angor Rot. I can’t think of any solution that required me to be creative in using multiple abilities together.

Enemy AI is non-existent, if they’re close to you and looking at you, they’ll attack, otherwise nothing. Ball-achingly dull is the variety too, just run at them and swing a sword combo. Done. What the enemy does really doesn’t matter much. Falling down a pit or landing on spikes, funnily doesn’t cause you to lose a life but just return to the closest safe spot. Only running out of health loses a life.

Game Tutorial 101: if you use tutorial boxes, remember to include the control scheme. In stage 2, you need to begin sliding down pipes. A helpful text box pops up to tell you to slide, but with no indication of how to do so. Maybe I was being dumb, but I got stuck here longer than I care to admit. For one, I think, reasonable excuse. This game uses the d-pad (or analogue stick) for movement, and up to this stage just 2 buttons: run and jump. There are so many unused buttons you could map to sliding, so congratulations if you guessed you had to crouch next to the tunnel and press jump.

There are collectibles in each stage: gnomes, which bounce around for you to chase and old socks. None are all that tricky due to the very basic level design, but really, don’t bother. There’s also the classic tell-tale sign of an unfinished game when the stage just ends out of nowhere. At some random interval ‘stage clear’ will appear on the screen and off you pop to the next: no real transition, no attention to detail, just off you go.

Boss fights, as you may suspect appear at the end of each area, but they are utterly tedious. Exemplifying the unfinished nature is the final phase of the final fight against Morgana. With around a quarter of her health bar remaining, she proceeded to dramatically pull the background away and leave just the platform we’re on and a giant time warp in the background. All this foreshadowing manifested as nothing more than her slowly moving to the left, then the right, then back to the left one last time; by which stage she’d been defeated. Were there to be one final big assault, I was not to witness it.

If you told me an intern turned up at WayForward’s offices with this as their demo, I’d believe you. If their trial period were to change the models and animations, again; it fits. That they then went through the effort of voicing it properly and think that justifies a 3-hour game being $40: mystifying. The cherry on top would be to find out that said intern never even got offered a full-time job.

Pass on this. If you’re a fan of the show and still curious, wait until it’s less than $10. With trash like this, it won’t take long.