Trash Panic (PS3)
In most people’s lives, being eco-friendly is a rather simple task. It can be as simple as taking a few steps to make sure you put something in a trash can instead of litter. It can be as easy as flipping the light switch before leaving a room. Being considerate for the environment is definitely good, but the individuals who have the most impact on it aren’t just making sure not to throw a cigarette butt out the car window. The people in charge of huge corporations that produce some heinous waste in huge quantities have much more to consider when determining how to dispose of trash, and while it would be nice if they let morals triumph over profits and simplicity, it’s easy to say they should when you’ve never been in that situation yourself. That’s where Trash Panic comes in, the conflict it so pithily describes as Eco vs. Ego manifesting in the form of a puzzle game where your goal is to get rid of a bunch of trashing falling in from above.
Trash Panic’s design centers around a large garbage can that starts off each level empty but gradually fills up as new pieces of trash enter slowly from above. The player is able to guide the incoming trash and rotate it, and so long as three pieces of garbage don’t go spilling over the edges, they can continue playing that stage. Simply stacking the trash is not a long term solution, so when a piece is drifting down through the air, you can choose to slam it, the impact it has with preexisting garbage able to help with crushing them down to size. The durability and shape of the refuse you’re trying to break down is an important consideration to make as something hard will take smashing many objects against it to finally crack, but those objects are likely going to shatter themselves hitting something so rugged. An object with a pointy end can be great for splitting trash in half if positioned properly, but there are some objects like balls that will instead bounce away if slammed down to prevent you from mindlessly smashing all the trash together to break it down to smaller pieces.
There are six unique levels in the game’s main mode, although the Sweets difficulty won’t let you see them all. If you play in Main Dish or higher though, the levels all have varying types of trash to keep up the variety as you progress. Starting in an office may seem mundane, but right out of the gate you have people throwing out entire computer monitors, dog houses, and other unusual garbage that only fits because your garbage can is enormous. It gets bigger in later stages though, the game progressing to the point you’ll start slamming objects as large as buildings, ships, mountains, and dams into the play area to try and smash them down to size. The escalation in the size of the objects you’re handling means that the garbage can will be filled up much faster if you don’t manage the incoming refuse properly, and utilizing the durability and form of certain objects will only get you so far.
This is where the Eco vs. Ego system comes into play. While crushing the garbage down and breaking it to pieces is considered carbon neutral here, there are some other objects that will enter the play field you can utilize to destroy garbage. If you don’t use these you’ll inevitably start to get a bunch of clutter at the bottom of your can as well, so you can’t ignore these options, although the ease with which you use your options varies. If you don’t care about your environmental impact, you can utilize fires to burn away the garbage, some objects like toilet paper perfect kindling for starting a big blaze and others like gas tanks even dropping oil that can help burn down a large amount of waste all at once. Explosives can also enter the play field, and lighting these up will not only obliterate a lot of the trash in the can, but their dramatic explosions can also have a visual impact on the environment, areas like the city background practically nuked if you burn some dynamite and a mountain setting actually shifting into a volcano if you get an explosion going. While the game will shame you for leaning towards Ego solutions on the scoring screen, there really is no immediate downside to embracing these paths to success, but going eco-friendly does have its perks.
If you choose to avoid the temptation to burn garbage, you can unlock cosmetic rewards like different trash can types, but tossing away the valuable resource of fire and explosives leaves you with very little special to destroy the detritus building up at the bottom of your can. Your only eco-friendly tool is a pink decomposition ball that requires water to function properly. These balls will grow outward and break down nearby trash if you can feed them enough water before they disappear, and the game usually does provide some water objects around when they appear. Even if it didn’t you can hold onto one object for a while to use when you please, although the game does sometimes swap out your held item on its own which can ruin long term planning like that. Decomposition balls are testy and will shrivel up if they touch oil, but they can dissolve objects that contain oil so long as it isn’t spilling out, and if you’re lucky enough to have two balls in play at once, they can join up to form an even more powerful version of themselves. However, decomposition balls are rare, slow, fragile, and can lead to a lot of trash build-up if you try to rely on them exclusively. If it was harder but more rewarding then the environmental message would be clear, but the problem with Trash Panic is, inherently, it is incredibly hard no matter how you play.
While you can likely get through Sweets mode just playing reactively, Main Dish and higher requires much more strategy, often leading to replaying levels to learn the general trash sequence you’ll receive. While it’s not the same every time you play a level, important tools or obstructions are repeated at certain intervals so you can try to plan around incoming decomposition balls or prepare yourself for a particularly huge and troublesome piece of trash. However, the distribution is definitely weighted towards providing multiple difficult situations that can end a run easily if you don’t reply just right or were in a bad spot before a piece of trash arrived, and that bad spot might not even seem awful until a strangely shaped piece of garbage drops in. Even if you are trying to manage your waste well, there are special objects like the Boss items you need to destroy in a set amount of time or a delicate Mottainai item that you need to avoid breaking until one of the game’s garbage gremlins can approach the can and pull it aside. If you mess up the Boss item destruction or accidentally break the fragile Mottainai, unbreakable garbage will rain in from above and flood your can to make winning almost impossible unless the round was almost over already.
Even if you try to overcome the game’s devious choice of items by any means necessary, the thing that prevents Trash Panic from being a brutal challenge and outright turns into pure frustration is the sloppy physics involved in how items enter the trash can. Despite the player needing to be precise in how objects are placed in the can to succeed, the way they break or bounce can seem surprisingly unreliable. Even heavy objects that seem like they’d be able to split apart if banged together can instead lead to an item inexplicably launching out of the trash can if you slam it down with the angle slightly off, and with only three failures aloud per level, you can find the physics mistakes leave little room for your own errors as you’re trying to learn how to succeed.
What’s worse is that the interior of the trash can is meant to be a pile that behaves realistically based on what’s inside it, but gravity doesn’t always remember to work in there. Chunks of debris can hover in the air even after the objects that used to be beneath it were burned away or decomposed, and while you can shake your controller to shake the trash can around, this doesn’t always rectify the situation since shaking is essentially going to leave them in a pile whose shape you can’t dictate well. Water and oil both will ignore objects in the can as well and start filling it from the bottom, the small quirks in trash falling making it so sometimes the decomposition ball can’t squeeze through even as you tried to plan for it. The way objects drop can be incredibly touchy too, to the point where I restarted one level any time the large water-filled dam didn’t tilt over the right way at the beginning because it basically doomed the rest of the level if it was slightly off in placement despite the falling objects being inherently time sensitive as they’ll continue downward regardless. Perhaps one comfort is the falling trash at least can seem surprisingly slow to come even when you’re later in a level, but that can’t make up for how dependent you are on an inconsistent system for success.
A few other modes exist in Trash Panic, but besides easy mode’s more forgiving nature and the lower pressure affairs of endless mode or playing singular levels on their own, these come out too tough to enjoy as well. Multiplayer has players compete to keep their can from spilling over, and while sending garbage to the opposition for sabotage is a sound concept, the fact survival can often rely so heavily on the right objects being placed in the right place at the right time, it feels like this interference is too powerful. The small set of missions aren’t particularly great either, one shrinking your can size in half with the predictable spike in difficulty associated with having less room to work and another being a boss rush. One mission is at least more of an unappealing slow crawl rather than a brutal battle to simply survive, a bell-ringing challenge just having you drop in logs onto a bell and burning them away so the can doesn’t get filled while doing so. Unfortunately, Trash Panic seems too caught up in making things incredibly challenging rather than making the trash compacting task satisfying, and these extra modes just continue to exacerbate the problems rather than introduce some angle to get around those issues.
THE VERDICT: Trash Panic’s garbage crushing concept seems like a fun idea for a puzzle game at first, but it ends up with a strangely muddled message. Taking an eco-friendly route to clearing the trash can is harder but gives special rewards, and while the fires and explosions that vaporize waste are visually spectacular, the ease of use comes with no rewards beyond removing the waste. That message is actually fine in theory, but Trash Panic decides getting rid of garbage in general should be a frustrating and inconsistent affair where even trying to play by the game’s rules can be upset by physics errors and a rigid requirement of placing trash just so to have a hope of surviving certain stages. The easy content is minimal compared to most of the game being surprisingly hard, and the satisfaction of successes is too often outweighed by the design flaws that make some losses feel unjust.
And so, I give Trash Panic for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. Trash Panic’s design concept isn’t flawed, but it’s rigid insistence on the player doing so many things perfectly while sabotaging those efforts with a weak physics engine means much of the game becomes frustrating. There are moments of good balance, some of the challenging levels even putting up a strong fight but still feeling achievable without memorizing the incoming pieces and hoping things won’t randomly go awry, and it’s those moments that show what Trash Panic could have been. Crushing and breaking the trash is a fun concept and using the different compositions of the refuse to pull off the destruction involves the player thinking about their actions enough without the game insisting so many pieces of trash are placed perfectly or eliminated properly. Floating trash in particular is a problem that feels like it shouldn’t exist, but shaking the trash to move it around to adjust for the game’s inconsistencies almost feels like a trap since it removes strategic object placement to get around an error outside your control. A lot of little ideas like the Mottainai and multiplayer are on the right track, but the game makes survival such a chore in both the need to research through repeated attempts and the retries already required to get around the game’s physics quirks. Unfortunately you can’t even experience much of the game’s content without growing irritated by just trying to stay in the game.
The environmental message in Trash Panic is easy enough to interpret once you realize how the resources contribute to play, but the way it’s conveyed is a problem not because it’s unclear or heavy-handed, but because the game around it pulls no punches while also tipping things against the player unfairly. It’s hard to even want to play eco-friendly when the supposedly easier Ego option of dynamiting away a full can of garbage can still not be enough to win a level. Perhaps instead you could say the game ends up with the message that trash can never be dealt with well, but you can potentially get an eco-friendly ending and the message would still be polluted by physics flaws being the cause of some failures rather than trash pileup always being the culprit. While Trash Panic’s basics are sound enough that the game can’t be called complete garbage, the poor intermingling between imprecise mechanics and precise success requirements does end up with too much of the game playing like rubbish.