A new Tribes, ups and downs, lots of potential. Good single, different but enjoyable multi.
User Rating: 8.9 | Tribes: Vengeance PC
Lets start with the bad. Besides the lack of ammo with the sniper rifle the weapons seemed good to me. It seems like they took out alot of the more technical stuff of the game. They reduced the number of packs to 4 and you must now wait for vehicles and deployables to spawn. My biggest quam is defense, an attacking heavy can remove any mines/turrets in 1 mortar round and cause huge amounts of havoc. The base is extremely hard to defend, while attacking is really easy. But the good. One thing you need to realize is people are comparing it too much to the old ones. If this game was the first one, and you never heard of the name before what would you think? I think it would be a GREAT game! I was caught alittle off gaurd by some of the changes, but its nothing I can't live with. THe single player is fun (I enjoyed flying a fighter while playing an 8 year old girl, and also mowing down the enemy as her), and I love the cutscenes. I am REALLY curious to see how it ends. The game definitly can be difficult for those of you who want it to be. I am not sure that the way deployables and vehicles spawn is the team forcing thing they thought it would be. A group wouldn't wait for a vehicle. Its the same thing I feel when I play Halo. Halo wasn't anything new, we have all killed zombies and aliens before. We have driven vehicles and fired rocket launchers. What Halo was is a game that looked and most importantly FELT right in your hands. You sort of became one with the game without effort. It grabbed at you, the same could be said with Tribes: Vengeance. I have been extremely frustrated with it in multplayer, but I am drawn even now to play. If you want it broken down to the basic feel of multiplayer, here it is: Its no longer war, its a skirmish. I always felt in 1 and 2 as if I was fighting for the planet, now it seems more like 2 sides finding eachother and starting a battle, with no big stake in the land. I just turned down my reviewer's tilt, the reason is because though I enjoy it as a new game, no surprise since its new people, they didn't do much in the way of preparing us for the big changes. Not a big complaint but that mixed with excessively difficult defense made me take it down 1 little more notch. Who would want this game? Well any hardcore Tribes fan of course. If you enjoyed PlanetSide but found it 1. lopsided or 2. too time consuming, you might wanna check it out. Anyone looking for not quite realistic damage but not everything explodes and you blow up too (between unreal and America's Army/Ghost Recon damage structure). One could say it resembled halo... though tribes did come first :) Last, (but by no means are these the only people, just the ones I think have the best chance of loving it), those participating in LAN or Clan battles. Teamwork will be optimized and with teamspeak (teamspeak.org) your clan can work with microphones too. Of course people looking for a fast paced action game will like it, seems to me like they sped up all the armors (much to all snipers shagrin) so combat is frequent and can get intense. ...yeah I don't know the meaning of the word organizational writing. nor do I know if that is a word... Non-review sidenote: Who the heck builds a base that is a literal 10 second walk from the enemy base? :P 
