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Next on our list is Trine 2, a well known and popular indie title that doesn’t necessarily have a performance bias based on graphics vendor- making it a pretty decent game for benchmarks.
Shield owners don’t really have any need to play Trine 2 from the cloud as each tablet comes with a very well optimized Android port of the game preinstalled. However, we are going to take the cloud for a spin anyway.
This is another game that doesn’t let us see the full graphical settings from within the menu. We would assume that this game is also running at 720p. There is no in-game benchmark this time to give us an average frame rate reading but given how powerful the server hardware is, I doubt Trine 2 should be any trouble to run.
In order to give us a simple benchmark run, we chose to start a new game and play through the short opening tutorial, which introduces us to the basic platforming and puzzle elements of this game. We also get to try out each of the three characters.
While Trine 2 does offer a smoother gameplay experience when compared to Arkham City, it still isn't perfect and doesn’t hold up well compared to the Android port.
While we didn’t experience any input lag during Trine 2, we did notice audio breakages and video stutter at times. Unfortunately, Trine 2 is a puzzle platformer, meaning that the timing of these stream hiccups is crucial to the gameplay- one bad lag spike could land you in some form of dangerous pit, which can be hard to recover from.
Is cloud gaming viable for puzzle platforming titles like Trine 2 with current technology? While the experience is close to being good enough, the video stutter is just a little too frequent to give this one a pass. GRID almost gets it right here, the small lag spikes weren't completely ‘game breaking’ but it is still a performance compromise that many gamers won't want to make.
