5-Oct-2004 For several years now, a tight-knit group of the gaming elite have been off in the far-flung corners of the Internet enjoying a highly tactical, nicely team-centric game known as Tribes 2 or (if they're a bit more traditionalist) Starsiege: Tribes. Central to the mastery of these games is the jetpack: here only he who truly understands the power of his own momentum, and the artful downhill sliding known as skiing becomes l33t, and his skills are shown in more ways than lying on a hill and endlessly sniping at spawn points. Now, for once, the publishing peeps were paying attention, and when they saw all the cult fun being had their exploitation antennae started twitching. If a highly respected developer was entrusted with the Tribes format and tailored it for the mass market, who knows what wonders might occur? And, while Irrational is at it, why not develop a single-player contingent with all the ski-fresh goodness of the online game? And why not make it one big tutorial so that noobs are given a couple of seconds before having their arse handed to them when they plug into multiplayer games?
Why Not Indeed So here we have the fruits of this labour. A giant tutorial that doesn't resort to endless target ranges and angry men shouting instructions at you about how to crouch. It's a game that appears to lag behind the current crop of high-budget, high-intensity shooters, with comparatively basic graphics, sound, ragdolls and peculiarly bouncy object physics - but it's also a game with some rarely seen sparkle. Whether you're marvelling at its remarkable fluidity (milked straight from the bosom of the goddess of gameplay), or ogling the epic, five-character narrative that leaps from generation to generation and consistently flicks your intrigue switch - it's clear that Vengeance is on to something good.
It's Like Dynasty There are three main factions within the game - the sniffy Imperials who control interplanetary affairs with a royal blue iron fist, the Phoenix tribe that the Imperials have forced into the wilderness that lies within their territory, and the Blood Eagles - who are a lot like the Phoenix but markedly more evil.
The action kicks off aboard the regal Imperial flagship with a princess called Victoria being coerced into a politically-minded marriage, before (one sudden Phoenix attack and a fairly casual kidnapping later) having a bit of a culture shock. Seduced by the charms of her Phoenix abductor Daniel, she begins to see the truth behind her royal parents' heavy-handedness and the plotline kicks into gear. The action then flips between this timeline (which is actually the past) and the exploits of her daughter Julia - who 30 years later has used bitter memories of her childhood to become a battle-hardened tribal sports star. Levels then skip back and forth, raising and answering questions about the eponymous lust for vengeance that plagues many of the cast. Over the course of all of this you get to control five characters: Victoria, Julia, the impressively side-burned Daniel, a battle-hardened Phoenix Heavy called Jericho and, best of all, a mysterious metal-bodied cybrid known as Mercury. If you're slightly geeky, he's a bit like the Silver Surfer. If you're not at all geeky, he's like an extremely cool man who's been made out of metal.
Now I'm not saying that Tribes: Vengeance is set to win any virtual Oscars for Best Cannon Fodder in a Supporting Role, nor am I going to suggest that you won't find the petulant princesses more than slightly annoying to control when you start the game. I'm not even going to refute the claim that cheesiness is only ever a step away from the Victoria/Daniel love plot. What I will say, however, is that the structure of Tribes: Vengeance is a hugely brave, original and thoroughly excellent attempt to break convention - taking you away from your accustomed shootage blueprint and into pastures new. It's true to say that Max Payne 2 did similar things with time-skips and parallel levels for separate characters. It's also true to say that these were more effectively signposted, and done in a more coherently cinematic style. That said, in terms of chin-stroking, information dripfeeding and coaxing 'WTF?' moments out of apparently simple (yet simultaneously illuminating) moments in the script, Tribes: Vengeance is an experiment that's been pulled off with stunning flair. I, personally, see this as the best shooter plot since the original Deus Ex.
Airborne Aerobics All this would come to nowt, however, if the gameplay wasn't worth buggery. So be thankful that the fluidity of movement provided by the game's slipping and sliding makes it such a joy to play. At first you'll be clueless, but as time goes on you learn how to ski towards bumps in the environment and use them in conjunction with your momentum and your jet's power reserves to reach great speeds and elevations. The way you learn all this is by trial and error, and the way you improve through practice is a lot like honing your skills in the Tony Hawk's series - as demonstrated by the considerable number of natural half-pipes you'll discover throughout the game.
The early chapters are designed to familiarise you with this system but then, all of a sudden, it throws a hairpin into the learning curve. Julia's stadium-based sports events (which lack teamwork, but remain conveniently similar to Tribes multiplayer) are addictive to play, yet border on the infuriating for the casual player. Then again, this is presumably intended as a clever way of ensuring that you're up to speed with the essence of Tribes combat before getting you back into the story proper.
If there's one adjective that describes the action in Tribes: Vengeance, it's 'satisfying'. It's an excellent shooter in itself, but its true charm lies in the fact that it consistently manages to conjure up moments that make you feel pretty impressed with your new-found skills and tribal finesse. Even combat in its simplest form can pump you up. One situation had me as Mercury, poised with a sniper rifle on the edge of a valley. I had just left a lone sentry with the merest smidge of health - and a slight boost and a carefully managed ski down the hillside brought me straight to where he was standing in seconds. A sharp blaster shot to his chest saw him cartwheel backwards while I carried on sliding, speeding on over the lip of the opposite bank in a metallic blur. This straightforward frag made me very smug indeed, and it's this recurring smugness that kept me coming back to the game. And the fact that I was reviewing it, of course.
Tribal Master Chief Level design echoes Halo in that you're often presented with fantastic rolling panoramas to navigate before venturing down into sci-fi bases - generally being tasked with knocking out three points on your map before gaining access to your target. Uncannily observant grunts and a good but not great draw distance mean that long-range combat isn't as wonderful as it could have been, but there's still a lot of enjoyment to be had scouting out the terrain before skiing your way into outposts and duking it out with the defence system.
Below ground, meanwhile, matters don't quite match the fluidity and freedom provided by the cliffs and hummocks of the tribal terrain. However, they do still manage to charm with their odd architecture (who needs stairs when you have jetpacks?) and carefully choreographed ambushes.
It's fair to say that there are a couple of dodgy levels knocking about (generally the ones where the developer seems to feel obliged to include seen-it-all-before elements, like moving gun emplacements or excessive corridor killing). However, any early fears of repetitive gameplay are soon allayed by the varying styles of each character you play and the weapons they are allocated. The first time you play Jericho you may moan about the sudden restriction in speed and his clunkiness in the face of Victoria's lithe manoeuverability, but you soon discover that his massive destructive power makes for an entirely different style of play that is welcome when you reach the midway point of the game.
Each level tends to have a gimmick; you could be guiding a Heavy around a map and taking out gun turrets, for example, or more mind-blowingly, you could be controlling a defenceless Julia racing a besieged palace in a flashback where she's no more than six years old. As such, the repetition that could have plagued the game is neatly side-stepped - apart from in one or two duff levels.
Up The Arsenal The eclectic range of weapons is also well managed in both your own inventory and that of the soldiers you square off against, teaching you how to use your armaments as well as how to evade them. You may face the mortar early in the game (and you'll know its incredible power through the international language of the save game) but you won't get to love its green whistling beauty until your much later Heavy missions. In fact, the lion's share of weapons available to you are all winners; partly because they're so different from the usual FPS template (which, thinking about it, might explain my intense dislike for the Rocket Pod and the Grenade Launcher) and partly because, again, you feel so damn smug when you manage to hit a moving target with your Spinfusor's flying discs.
The vehicles you won't be quite so fussed about. Take a long hard look at the war machines lovingly laid out on these pages. If you're not already doing so, look again, this time with a curled top lip. As you'll see they're not particularly sexy in any way, shape or form. Even the best of them (the one-man Fighter which is an absolute joy to fly and star of the young Julia's mad dash through the besieged palace) looks like it's been entirely constructed from Technics Lego. As for the Tank, Rover and Bomber - well, none of them are really that bad, but all are well and truly outshone by their counterparts in Planetside, UT2004 and, above all, Halo. There's a definite mark of 'could do better' stamped on the armaments and controls of ground vehicles - and it's not helped by the fact that the levels that showcase them are often among the more uninspiring. It's usually more fun to travel on jet-boot anyway.
A Bit Tricky Another issue that'll raise hackles is difficulty, because when it wants to be, Tribes: Vengeance is extremely challenging. As I've mentioned, I thoroughly enjoyed the nail-biting provided by the ludicrously tight time limits in Julia's arena challenges, but there's more than a little dissent in the Zone ranks as to how unforgiving it gets. The game never reaches Far Cry Volcano levels of keyboard battery, but later levels do set up ambushes that (coupled with an occasional hazy objective) are guaranteed to set your teeth on edge. Then again, my greatest fear for Vengeance was that the AI wouldn't be able to cope with the extra dimension, and this really hasn't become a huge issue in the final product. It's clear that you're not playing online (the opposition don't ski as much as you do and run in odd patterns when you fire at them from a long range), but they are still proficient enough in the exchange of the explosive disc and the general skirmish that you rarely notice the cracks in the set-up.
Ice Cream I was making notes on a train last night in preparation for this review, and in a clearly countryside-addled state wrote the apocryphal words, "Tribes: Vengeance just feels satisfying in the same way that ice-cream tastes nice." Now this quote will clearly never be emblazoned on the game's box, nor should it ever have been included in a review of a triple-A title - but I was getting close to the truth.
Tribes: Vengeance just feels right. Its fun lies in simple movement - something overlooked in all other high-octane blasters, and it gives you such a feeling of fluidity, control and desire for self-improvement, that on a basic level it's extremely hard to dislike. There are issues, yes, but coupled with such an intriguing narrative structure, you get the impression that this is a game that will be fondly remembered for many years to come. Personally, I'm hooked. I want a pair of jet-boots and I want to be a princess more than ever before.
PC Zone Staff
// Overview
Verdict
Satisfying, intriguing and consistently fun
Uppers
Hugely impressive and well-constructed narrative structure Highly enjoyable skiing and jetting about Varied characters and gameplay styles Wide-ranging multiplayer capabilities
Downers
There are a few dodgy levels knocking around Lack-lustre vehicles
Some quarters have been worried about core tenets of Tribes multiplayer being lost in Vengeance. The big fear was that teamwork wouldn't survive the supposed Unreal Tournament-ization of affairs, coupled with the belief that much loved aspects such as the Shocklance, cloak pack and sensor-jammer had been lost in transition. We'll have an in-depth review of Vengeance's multiplayer masterclass in Online Zone as soon as servers are up and burners are burning, but until then my initial impressions of the beta test are a broad thumbs-up. I'm a mainstream muppet, and I don't speak for the purists, but myself and Mr Holden have been having a blast with it and will continue to do so for many months to come. Capture the Flag will remain our main focus, but my fiddles with restricted-spawn Arena deathmatchs, fuel-stealing, a superb game in which opposing teams attempt to throw a ball into a goal and the classic Tag-style game known as Rabbit have all felt like someone's actually managed to give me the moon on a stick. There are some superb maps in the full package as well - from Garuda Gorge's simplicity to Junk's vehicle battleground - and all the smugness I've spoken about in single-player is magnified many times when you actually connect your discs with a real human player. Aficionados will moan - it's in their nature, but they needn't worry that much since they'll be more than catered for by the deluge of grumble-fixes and mods that'll flood fansites after Vengeance's release. Everyday folk like myself, meanwhile, will be left with the vanilla version - and it's looking like we'll love every minute of it.
Stay tuned for our Vengeance multiplayer review.
// Grapple-Mania
It may seem odd to have a grappling hook in a game that's so jetpack-heavy - but its inclusion is presumably to encourage l33t showboating from online tribal prima donnas. It first crops up when you're controlling the kiddy Julia - where its bastard-hardness and reluctance to bend around overhanging ledges is cruelly exposed. It's great to swing back and forth, peppering bemused tribesmen with blaster shot, so it's definitely a worthy inclusion. However, it's more of a tool for the pros than the plebs like myself, who somehow manage to make a character like Mercury - who exudes coolness from every pore - look like a Cyberman strapped to extension cable.
The grappler recalls the happy days of Quake modding. Ah…
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Hugely impressive and well-constructed narrative structure
