Tribes 2 Review

8.7

Format PC

Developer Dynamix

Publisher Sierra

Genre Unknown

A follow-up to Tribes? This can only mean war. Phil Wand gets suited and booted

It's strange, but you'd think nobody in the UK played Tribes. Jump into a game of Team Fortress Classic and you'll see messages from people arranging their next Counter-Strike session. Join an Unreal Tournament server and at least two players will be arguing the case for Quake, with someone else reminiscing about the amazing port of Doom on the Atari Jaguar. But never do you hear someone say, 'Stuff this hostage rescue crap, I'm off to play Tribes'.

Why is that? Let us not forget that, at the time of its launch, Tribes was a radical departure from the norm. Significantly, it was the first multiplayer arcade blaster with an emphasis on team co-ordination. The sci-fi fantasy graphics were slick and rapid, with lag nothing like the issue it is in Counter-Strike, and manned vehicles were not just part of the landscape but were there to be used, adding a whole new dimension to strategy. It was even cheaper than most of its rivals, and had a well-stocked trophy cabinet thanks to positive reviews in the gaming press. For the answer, one can look to the new features that Dynamix has included in its much-anticipated follow-up, Tribes 2.

Most obviously, there are the spesh new graphics - and don't say you didn't notice. Next to the pale colours and jagged edges of the 1998 original, the latest game is really rather arresting. Gone are the old 16-bit textures, and in their place are intricate 32-bit tapestries that give every level real depth and colour. Trees, shrubs and cacti dot the landscape and make handy resting places for your eyeballs. Previously, vast swathes of desert meant you ended up with your ocular muscles going into spasm, snow-blinded by miles and miles of the same coloured landscape.



ARE WE THERE YET?

Thankfully, the long slog between your base and the enemy's is not as boring a journey as it once was. Hills rise grandly above you, and dales tumble away beneath you. New ground vehicles - Grav Cycle, Grav Tank and Forward Base (used to establish an inventory station nearer the front line) - allow you to get from A to B in the shortest time, although the latter seems to have blancmange for suspension and is difficult to control over rough terrain.

Depending on how high you have the detail levels set, all objects are chased along by soft shadows that add dollops of realism to every scene, with draw distance and fogging heightening the sense of grand scale. It should be said that previous testing of the beta product revealed that elaborate outdoor scenes really took their toll on hardware, and were prone to sloppy frame-rates. This release version is now much smoother, and with a few tweaks to the graphics settings - sliders are provided to allow near infinite combinations of special effects - a middle of the road 400MHz PIII was able to dash along without a hint of a wheeze. Mind you, you'll still need a 1GHz processor and monster video hardware to appreciate everything at full pelt.

Making progress is just as before: dead easy, but an art all the same. Seasoned warriors will be glad to hear that it's still possible to ski into valleys (in the original, players learned it was possible to tap the jump button while traversing slopes, thus gliding at speed over the surface). Dynamix has now made it a feature rather than an exploit, ensuring that the weightier classes aren't able to pull the same stunt. Of course, your trusty jump pack remains integrated with your armour, allowing you to right-click yourself out of ruts and away from trouble. It's still amazing to watch even the most dewy-eyed newbie making rapid, graceful progress across the roughest terrain, and rather alarming when veteran players descend on you from a great height, plasma gun barking fizzing globs of death at the top of your head.



BELLY'S GONNA GET YA

As with its predecessor, Tribes 2 offers players a choice of three armour classes: Light, Medium and Heavy. The agile Light class is best suited to flag-running and scout duty, Medium class to attacking, and Heavy class to eating pies. However, players remain free to adopt roles which suit team tactics, even though the new Command Circuit feature (see boxout) means contradictory orders arrive thick and fast. For example, Heavy classes may decide to hop aboard a Transport or Grav Tank - given the larger maps, they'll need to pack a picnic and loo roll if walking - to help their team break through enemy lines, and trust that other team members are keeping the base defences in order.

Each class is able to carry up to five weapons, plus six grenades and three mines, although exactly what you carry is subject to restrictions. The Light class, for example, has only three weapon slots and cannot use the Fusion Mortar, whereas the Heavy belly class has five slots but cannot carry the Laser Rifle. Knowing who has what, especially when faced with an adversary, is all part of the strategy.

Along with a menacing new faction, the Bioderm Hordes, the Shocklance and Missile Launcher make their debut in Tribes 2. The former is much like the knife in Team Fortress Classic, and when used correctly enables stealthy players to sneak up behind their foe and kill them with a single jab. The latter fires guided missiles, and is used primarily to lock on to enemy vehicles and destroy them before they get close enough to be a threat. Used in conjunction with a skilled hand and targeting laser, it's also possible to knock opposition jet-packers out of the sky. As with the original game, the colossal size of the maps combined with the way players remain airborne during combat serve to slow the tempo of the game, and adrenaline levels never peak as high as in rival shooters like Unreal. Whether this is a bad thing or not depends on your liking for a triple figure pulse rate.



MULTI-TALENTED

Next to the graphics, the most important addition to Tribes 2 is the single-player game. Along with five training missions that give newbies a more gentle learning slope to climb, Bot Matches are games where your opponents and team-mates are computer-controlled, meaning you can now get a half-decent game in without having to dial up and cuss at the lag. However, although the Bots are some of the best we've seen, in that they carry out base maintenance, go flag running and even chat with one another, the online game is still where Tribes excels, and you'll be missing out if you stick with a local network setup.

Multiplayer games come in one of eight different flavours, and as such present a lot more variation than many rival titles. Bounty is like vanilla death-matching, although players are given the name of a player whom they must frag, and suffer a penalty if they kill the wrong guy. Capture and Hold sees teams capturing a set number of objectives, and points awarded depending on how long they can keep them. The new verbal taunts, similar to those in Quake III: Team Arena and Unreal Tournament, along with real-time voice chat, add to the frenetic nature of this particular variation.

Capture The Flag is the age-old game of stealing the enemy's flag while protecting your own, and remains as popular a variation as ever. Deathmatch is as you'd expect, with everyone out for themselves, Hunter is the bastard son of Deathmatch and Capture The Flag where dead players drop flags which must then be picked up and ferried back to base. Team Hunters is a minor variation on this, where warriors are organised into teams. In Rabbit, one player carries the flag and gets more points the longer he can hold on to it, and Siege sees one team defending a switch deep inside a fortress. Once the switch is flicked, the game ends and the teams swap places.

In summing up, Tribes 2 is a vat of undiluted fun for team players and organised clans. Add an integrated browser and email, designed to aid communication between clan members, and it's hard to see why anyone after co-operative action would go elsewhere for their fix. The only downside is that it remains a little too focused on team tactics, meaning newcomers and habitual deathmatchers will feel wholly out of sorts. You need to know that your cohorts are looking out for you, and when they leap out of bombers before reaching the target, or climb a mountain to marvel at the view, you do get a little disheartened. Lack of co-ordination is the bane of many an online game, and in Tribes 2 it can ruin the whole experience.