A Trespasser is someone who strays into territory who should stay clear of. It applies to the heroine of the story, but after playing Trespasser, doesn't it also apply to the team? This has been the dream game at Dreamworks - the monster leverage of the Jurassic Park license behind it, and the opportunity to bring dinosaurs back to life, on your PC at least. But, like John Hammond, they blew it.Trespasser's story starts when a young traveller called Anne, exploring Central America in her light aircraft, is forced to ditched over water, and washes up on a strange tropical island. There are widespread remains of human habitation - sophisticated structures too. Pretty soon she puts two and two together and realises this is the infamous 'Site B' of Ingen's dinosaur DNA experiments. The place is probably teeming with dangerous prehistoric life. However, there is no way to get off the island except by exploring for some means to communicate with the mainland.
With that premise, Trespasser invites you to explore the densely-forested interiors of Site B. You will meet Brachiosaurs, you will encounter the T-Rex quite a bit, you will walk gingerly round the stegasaurus. And you will struggle to lift plans, hold onto guns and jump small gaps. Yes, Trespasser has a 'real physics' engine which means objects all move as realistically, and unmanageably, as possible. Pick up a gun and you can wield it. Realistic. Brush against an object and it frequently falls out of your hand. Unrealistic.
The designers have missed the point. Games use conventions that may bend the exact requirements of physics in order to allow us to make progress and to stop the silly things that happen in Trespasser from happening. In real-life, climbing onto a crate is a simple operation, so 'realism' in a game should dictate the same. In Trespasser, simple acts like this are a pedantic chore.
Your main adversaries throughout are the raptors, and you defend yourself with the guns left lying 'realistically' around. Of course, if you leave one level with a weapon, it has realistically disappeared when you begin the next. Ammo is normally scarce often leaving you at the mercy of a raptor with no realistic means of escape.
One area where realism doesn't lend a hand is in the graphical depiction. Although Trespasser is obviously designed for 3D acceleration, it features some of the worse 'clipping' we've ever seen. Large foreground objects like trees appear and disappear as a matter of course. The dinosaurs, to be fair, don't suffer this. They look pretty good, even close up. The other horrible graphic problem is caused by bad 'interpolation'. Need an explanation?
When you write a 3-D where objects move from the distance to close-up, you don't use just one single object model. When you're far away, you don't need as much detail, so you use a simpler version of that object. You change the 'level of detail' as the object gets closer. On good games, this is as smooth as to be unnoticeable. In Trespasser it's beyond noticeable - it's irritating and distracting as ugly shapes glitch and flicker into beautiful plants. Life is really too short to go into some of the other things about the game, like the bendy arm and the annoying voiceovers.
We are led to believe that Dreamworks have produced a patch of 34MB (should really be called a graft) to rectify some of these problems. But as the site is currently kaput, we can't confirm how it works. One this is for sure, it can't sort the fundamental weaknesses of this game.
