Tribes 2

Guns, Jetpacks, more guns, more jetpacks, more death, more destruction. That's Tribes for you.

Tribes 2 story is pretty basic, your faction hates the other factions, then there's some ugly mofo's that your factions created that went postal, and everyone hates them. That's the story, it's not much but it's enough to warrant a whole lot of mayhem, and that's what Tribes 2 is all about.

The game features a solo game, which comprises of 5 or so missions, the missions are just basic training to get you into the feel of the game, if you have come from Tribes you can give it a miss, but otherwise it's a great help to get used to the games somewhat complicated interface. You play the game as a Scout, Assault, or Juggernaut. Scouts are faster with less health and defence, Assaults are the middlemen and Juggernauts are walking tanks.

Three classes may not sound like much, but when you modify and decide every weapon your character uses it becomes a whole new ball game. The game stores 10 configurations of items, or your favourites, so that you can easily get a new inventory of a specific make in mid battle by just hoping onto a inventory station. At first it is a little confusing, you can change from Scout to Juggernaut and back again in a matter of moments if you want, your entire weapons changing with you. You can also take dead enemy's weapons by dropping your own then just running over theirs to take them up, this is mainly just useful if your out of ammunition.

The game its self its broken down into different match types, death match, team death match, capture the flag, team rabbit 2, etc. All the maps are generally very large, but when the map is pumping with 64 people your going to wish it was bigger just so that you could save your hide. The game also features bots if you want to fill your game up some more or just want to have a burst alone, saving you from having to log onto the a internet server.

Because the levels are very open and your just one person, everyone one on the map, enemy or ally gets a coloured triangle next to them when they are in your vicinity or line of sight, this is so that you can find each other, otherwise it would be exceedingly difficult to do so.

Also to aid in fighting or defending is the command panel, not all users are given access to this, but if you are it is an effective way to sort out attacks and defence, also to find enemy's in your bases vicinity, if your base for example has a scanning radar any enemy's that go into its vicinity will show up on your command panel, allowing you to neutralize them effectively.

The games weapons are a pure bliss, my personal favourite is the Plasma Rifle, although on of the default weapons it as a significant slash with slaughters the enemy if your indoors. There is also a gun which acts very similar to a mini nuke, upon firing it lobs a grenade of some sort out that a few moments later explodes in a big greed mushroom laying waste to any unfortunate soul who happened to walk too close.

The game features a number of vehicles, sadly only a few can carry multiple people. The vehicles help from getting from point A to B but if your wanting to use them in combat you're going to have to be mighty skilled at using them. The vehicles are exceedingly difficult to use but once you have them down they're a charm. The flying vehicles I found the most annoying to use as they are rather irresponsive, or too responsive, and they all seem to be weighed down by lead or something. Over all the vehicles are rather good and help spice things up, but don't expect to see any kind of vehicular combat as seen in Battlefield.

Graphically the game is nice, not stunning, but that is to be expected since the game is a number of years old now but it still stands up graphically, although you will need a moderately high-end system to run a full game comfortably over the internet, but over LAN or against bots a system of 256 RAM should suffice. The draw distance is quite considerable, but not so much that you can see forever.

Character models all look very nice, although not very varied, but that is easily fixed as you can create your own custom skins if your not happy with the ones provided. So although the game is considerably old now it still looks very nice, especially with everything turned on and to their maximum.

Sounds play a considerable part in Tribes, as they act as the main point of communication. Instead of everyone just trying rapidly the game has a lot of preinstalled voice commands that can be easily accessed by pressing V. After that you get more options, then more depending on your choices. For instance pressing, VSAA you will yell over the com-stat to the rest of your team, "I am attacking". Or if you press, VFF, you will say "I have the flag". The game doesn't include slander though, so not built in smack talk sorry.

Although the game only features 5 or so voices to choose from in the midst of combat your not going to worry too much that everyone sounds the same anyway. The music struck me immediately as it isn't very gamish, well to say that is a bit of a generalisation, but compared to other games of the ilk its music is very striking, as it is a sort of rock music, but luckily it fits the futuristic death match of the game.

The last-ability of the game is prevalent from the first time you pick it up, this game will more than likely get its turn of Online rotation or LAN as a death match favourite as it is considerably different from most team based games on the market. If you friends are fans of Battlefield and Unreal they will find a second home in Tribes 2 as it features the team based slaughter of BF with the furious futuristic mayhem of Unreal. But because the game features a almost non-existent single player, and the only way to single player apart from the sad campaign is to boot up a game with bots in LAN. So if your internet connection is not powerful enough to keep you in the game, or your not going to be using a LAN much then Tribes 2 may not hold much last-ability if any for you.

System Requirements - Windows 95B/98/2000/ME/NT SERVICE PACK 4.0 Minimums: CPU Speed: See Video Card List. RAM: 64MB RAM (128MB suggested) HARD DRIVE SPACE: 531 MB HD Space. CD-ROM: 4X Speed. SOUND CARD: DirectSound-Compatible (DirectInput game controllers supported) 12 MB or better Video Card. Supported Video Cards. Pentium:2 300GeForce2 Diamond Viperil, ATI Rage 128 Penttium2: 400 TNT, TNT2 Radeon. Matrox G400&G450 Voodoo 3 Pentium3: 500 Voodoo2, 4, 5 Kyro Permedia3