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RATING: (weak) 1 2 3 4 5 (awesome) (No Rating Assigned)
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IN BRIEF
Pros: Great new elements including a terrain editor, new vehicles, a single-player campaign, and new weapons. Cons: Vehicle controls are tough to get used to. In a nutshell: Awesome action. Like Tribes, but better. Multiplayer: Up to 64 *ESRB rating: T |
FACTS
Game Title: Tribes 2 Platform: PC Developer: Dynamix Publisher: Sierra Studios Release Date: March 29, 2001 Price: 44.99 |
THE REVIEW by Steven Kent for Gamers Today
The Brutal Rites of Tribes
Now nearly two years old, TRIBES is still one of the most popular games on the Internet. TRIBES is unique among first-person shooters for several reasons. For openers, it takes virtual man-hunting in a whole new direction-virtical. The combatants in TRIBES wear self-charging jetpacks that give them short boosts. You can't fly around indefinitely on these packs, but they're good for vaulting out of tight situations. They were also good for "skiing," a little trick in which players slide down the face of one hill, then use their jetpacks to cushion their landing and zip up the next.
TRIBES also featured a host of long- and mid-range weapons that allowed players to snipe and stalk each other from various distances. These weapons would not have worked well in games such as Quake that mostly take place in tight spaces; but they worked wonderfully in TRIBES' wide-open landscapes.
Above all else, however, TRIBES was a team game with squads of virtual guerillas working together.
TRIBES 2, a new game from Sierra Studios, builds on that tradition of squad-based battles by adding several all-new elements. While the basic gameplay remains nearly unchanged, many of the elements have been tweaked and improved, and TRIBES 2 includes some entirely new attractions.
The most notable change is a single-player campaign. The original game had a training mission that taught players how to use the jetpack, vehicles, and weapons.
Another immediate change is a terrain editor. This tool is similar in concept to the terrain editors in the Links and Tiger Woods golf simulations, except that it creates sand pits that are three kilometers wide with divots 600 feet deep. It also lets you place towers. That's right, TRIBES' dogs of war have now become indoor-outdoor animals.
Then there are the vehicles. The scooters and transports in TRIBES were strictly people-movers. Kiss that goodbye. TRIBES 2 includes a Scout ATV, a tank, and a 6-person APC. This time we're talking vehicular homicide at its best.
You can now take your battle skills to new depths-the combatants in TRIBES 2 fight it out on land, in air, and in the waters, too. The Sierra-ite who gave me my extended demo of TRIBES 2 tried to desmonstrate how he could hide from heat-seeking rockets by diving into the depths-the trick didn't work in this pre-ALPHA build. The water was gorgeous, murky depths that grew clearer as you reached the surface, visible currents-if there had been some colorful coral fish, I might have thought I was in Hawaii.
TRIBES 2 will also let players make things completely up-close and personal. Two of its new features are a cloaking device and a tazer-like weapon called a "shock lance." Use them in conjunction with each other, and you can sneak up on enemies and zap them into oblivion-a great ploy for stealing their flags.
TRIBES TALK: A WORD WITH TRIBES BRAND MANAGER LEE ROSINI
Gamers Today: Besides selling 10 million copies, what is the goal for TRIBES 2?
Lee Rosini: The name of the game with TRIBES 2 is building a community. We're already telling people that you can play TRIBES 2 with 50-plus players, but we're really hoping for a 64-player game.
GT: Heavy emphasis on team play?
LR: We've got capture the flag, siege, defend and destroy The thing that made Unreal Tournament such a great game, besides the fact that it was really good Net code and a lot of fun--
GT: And had amazing graphics--
LR: And great graphics, it had a lot of variety. We're going to have 10 game types plus we are going to open the scripting language up so that our community starts building stuff for TRIBES 2, and we're going to have this terrain editor. From a replayability standpoint, it's going to be insane.
GT: Will players need DSL to get the full effect?
LR: The answer to that is, "No." Most people who look at network code
say that TRIBES has some of the best network code to date. We've pulled off
seamless indoor and outdoor, and just from a playability standpoint, it's
really, really nice. We're trying to design it so that you can play on a
28.8 modem.
*For a complete explanation of ESRB ratings, check out the official ESRB Web site.
