Gameplay is from a third person perspective behind your massive trenched giving you full control of the action - left and right trigger fire your left and right weapons while the left bumper calls in emplacements. During the missions enemy kills earn you scrap, scrap is used to call in emplacements. Emplacements can be dropped just about anywhere and there’s a good variety and level of them to drop. Machine gun turrets are your all around defense, shotgun turrets are good against ground units. You’ll also get mine layers, repair bays, dampeners (slow), and a handful of others. Turrets not only have their own efficiency level, but they can be upgraded with more scrap mid-mission. As a bonus, co-op players can upgrade any emplacement currently dropped. All scrap when collecting is shared amongst the team, but each player has their own pool to spend on whatever defenses they’d like.
Co-Op in Trenched is almost essential, despite the game scaling the difficulty, several missions have you guarding multiple targets at once (some up to three or four) making it easy to see the strategy in having up to four players working together. The game’s co-op lobby and main launching point is the S.S. McKinley which allows you to find other recruits for your missions, outfit your trench, view other players trenches, and choose missions. During this stage you’ll want to figure out who is bringing what to the battle, as you’ll want to maximize the variety of defenses you have available as well as who has what weapons.
During the battles themselves, as you face off against 10-20 waves of enemies, communication is key to determining who gets what group of enemies. If one player is outfitted with flak machine guns, he’ll want to call out the flyers, while another loaded with shotguns might want to call out the burst transmitters who’s deadly grenade attacks rip apart your turrets.
Its obvious to see how hard Double Fine is driving home co-op gameplay in Trenched. Not only are several of the achievements geared towards co-op play, but there’s an entire co-op meta game called “The Regiment” which earns you further unlocks. For every player you play with, they’ll automatically be added to your regiment. Whether you play together from that point forward, on your own, or with another group, all the kills and stats get kicked back to the regiment for further unlocks. So perhaps there’s a regiment goal of killing 3500 enemies with machine guns, doing so across the number of players will unlock a new weapon.
It’s all the little things like this that make Trenched an incredibly replayable game. Missions themselves offer different rewards depending on how well you medal on them, and you can go back and play any mission at any time. The game oozes style in both writing, artwork and character design, and there’s numerous moments that are guaranteed to make you smile. While the game can be a bit frustrating in single player, the co-op is an absolute blast. Downloadable titles continue to impress us with their quality, quantity, and freshness. Trenched falls into everyone of those categories and delivers the co-op goods to go along with it.
Verdict
Co-Op Score
Overall
The Co-Op Experience: Team up with three other players and show off your customized Trenched Mech as you work together. The game also features a revive mechanic and will scale difficulty based on the number of players.
Co-Optimus game reviews focus on the cooperative experience of a game, our final score graphic represents this experience along with an average score for the game overall. For an explanation of our scores please check our Review Score Explanation Guide.