*I’m currently suffering a sinus infection so this may not be the most coherent thing I’ve written thus far on this site, right yeah OK yeah right?

Shazbot.

Tribes Ascend is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter, currently in BETA, made by Hi-Rez Studios – the folks wot dun brought you the OK MMO Global Agenda. If you’ve never heard of Tribes before, the original game ‘Starsiege’ which came out in 1998 was a bit of a hit at a time where multiplayer shooting was still relatively novel. The whole premise of Tribes is that your character has a jetpack and skiboots which let you traverse large, open maps at furious speeds using slopes and jetpack fuel management to make sure you can fly over hills and maintain speed. This single hook causes a Tribes game to be a much more skill-full affair than your average COD match. During a fight you have to be aware of not just your own direction, speed and immediate goal but also you need to have a keen eye for enemies that can fly at you from any direction.

Here, a picture says a thousand words, this video says more:

Looks like arse doesn’t it.

I missed out on Starsiege Tribes and Tribes 2 but I caught up with the series when Irrational Games released Tribes: Vengeance in 2004, it had a single player campagin that was alright, it was excellent training for its multiplayer which was utterly superb. But enough of the past, let’s look to the future.

I paid twenty of my English pounds to get into the Ascend BETA which felt a bit strange for a f2p game. I’m somewhat glad I did though because that money was translated into in-game currency which I have used to unlock a few of the many, many loudouts in the game. Each loadout is essentially a suit and weapon type, the default and free variant is Soldier which I suppose is just ‘medium’. There’s 15 loadouts available ranging from the speedy but weak to the strong but slow and everything in-between. Each one costs money to unlock, money which can be earned very slowly with XP earned through kills and by completing objectives. You could also just buy the loadouts with real, hard cash like I did but I wouldn’t of if I didn’t have to to get into the BETA.

So there’s gold right, gold is money you put into the game with real money, then there’s XP yeah? XP is what’s earned through the game, also right there’s credits OK yeah? Credits are what you earn during a match, it’s equal to your score and you spend these credits on perks like supply drops, air strikes and vehicles etc. It’s an interesting system which feels a bit like a free-to-play model gone up its own arse. I do appreciate the credits system, it’s good to reward players with perks who go for objectives rather than kill-streaks, it’s a good way to get people to work as more of a team in a similar way Battlefield does through the support and medic classes.

This is a team game after all, so far the only game mode is capture the flag – which is weird as CTF used to be THE RAGE back in the early 00’s but we hardly see it these days, it’s a little over-done. Even though the traversal mechanic brings a fresh element to any game-mode you throw at it, it still feels a little old school. The game is very faithful to the core Tribes experiance, the weapons require the sort of precision and reaction speeds only granted through a mouse, there’s nothing new to the game modes and even the maps have been ripped out of the old games.

Unfortunately adding to the old school feeling; the graphics do not seem to have improved much since Tribes Vengeance, this game is running on UE3 tech and features some really nice shadowing and ‘god rays’ but the environemnts just look dated, I’m not really moaning as I don’t come to Tribes for its visual fidelity but I think it could be something that new players will find hard to get behind.

I wonder if Ascend is squarely aimed at the loyal fan-base of its predecessors, I wonder if they think that is enough of a community to sustain a low-budget title such as this. This could be the reason for the untouched gameplay, maps, modes and *cough* graphics from a game which is coming up to being 7 years old now.

Still, it’s more Tribes and it’s fucking fun – it’s free when it comes out so everyone should give it a go, there’s still nothing else quite like it. Section 8 came close, Firefall looks like it might also come close but neither of them will be it and I don’t think anything else will.

Also,

*I know it’s in BETA but Hi-Rez if you’re reading this – sort the fucking User-Unfriendly Interface and menus out, it looks like a game from the 90’s!*

About the author

Michael Manning

Michael is a sound designer and composer working in the games industry. His portfolio can be found at www.manningaudio.com