Others say...

"I "Can't Shake the Feeling" That This Is the GAME OF THE WEEK!"
Well, Tribes Vengence is unbelievably fun. The graphics make it seem that this game got released in 2007!! LOL The story line is amazing on how you can choose between a robot or a factory. You can play over 200 secret levels if you know the code of conduct. If you are a fan of World of Warcraft, Reading Galaxy, or even Green Day, you will love this game. =-). I am so addicted to this game that I almost had to eat my hammer. Luckily, Tribes 2, got rid of my vengience. Since this game has robots, it almost seems not real cause robots are not even real so that is an upset. The only reason why I was thinking about giving this game a 4 out of 5 was the smell. I am not kidding, when i got the package it smelled like roasted underwear in the microwave. They must of had a false packaging at the factory where the game was make, oh well. One thing about this game that no one else mentioned is the soundtrack. I seriously have fallen in love with the soundtrack! LOL! I was looking on the internet to find how to buy it but I couldn't. So I just tried to record it with my Talkboy, but it didn't come out too good. The cons in this game is the monthly fee to play. You have to pay an unbelievable monthly fee of 75 dollars. But I didn;t care since my Grandmother also likes to play it! So she pays the fee! She is actually better than me, and she loves blowing people up! Level 122 baby!

" I can't shake the feeling that a huge oppertunity for a great game was missed here."
Once upon a time the original "Starsiege: Tribes" was the first game to introduce a wide array of features that are now considered to be the bare minimum standard. At the time things like driveable vehicles, teamwork centered multiplayer action and game types other than death match were considered nothing less than revolutionary. Tribes 2 carried on the work of the predicessor but the one thing that always prevented the game from really catching on was that it was Multiplayer only. Even *I*, a person who now loves multiplayer games over the internet, never bought into the Tribes games because of the mysterious Multiplayer only status.

Apparently, or perhaps unfortunately, the developers at Irrational Games decided multiplayer was a weakness of their game rather than a strength and decided to start over from scratch with their new game and throw in some single player for good measure. I was excited about the new design focous when I first heard about it. I figured that, because the developers promised the multiplayer would be just as good as ever, now was a good time to get into the Tribes universe and see what it had to offer. After all, even if the single player was awful, there had to be bots to play multiplayer matches aginst because it would be stupid not to port the single player AI over to make bots, right?

Being the cautious consumer I am though I naturally checked out the games website before buying it. Well, the site was a good deal less than helpful. If fact it told me a whole lot less than a preview of the game I had read almost 6 months before hand. Okay, I'll check the forums, theres gotta be people asking about the games features, and getting anwsers, there. First off I couldn't post on the forums without an account. Thats not too strange these days so I tried to make an account. Thats when the game made me angry for the first time. Apparently people with "free" email accounts (like hotmail), which means the vast and wide majority of internet users last time I checked, can't create accounts at Vevindi Universal's forums. That was sure nice of them. Luckly, you don't need an account to view the forums anyway so I just started reading and looking for posts asking if there were any bots in the game. Thats when the game made me angry for the second time. Seeing a pattern here? The games making me angry and I don't even own it yet. Not only had the publisher stated there wouldn't EVER be any bots but they basically blew off the question, insisting that if people really wanted bots they could just wait for someone to make a mod for that. Game publisher arrogance at its finest.

But I bought the game anyway, hoping the single player would be worth it. Now, I don't want to say it was awful, but there are some serious design flaws in the single player campaign. Though some people would disagree I thought the story was great and I liked the way you jumped into different characters for every mission effectivly allowing you to view the story from every angle and yet not ever being able to guess at the ending until the final mission. The problem is that the story doesn't really translate well into the Tribes universe and is totally incompatible with the games normally tactical and teamwork based gameplay. Too many missions, all of them in fact, have you acting as a rambo-style one man army. This would never work in multiplayer matches and only barely scrapes by in singleplayer because you are given a god like number of hit points to work with as the enemy is stripped of theirs. But even with that major change some levels are near impossible because of the games vehicles which were obviously not designed with their role in the single player game in mind.

If you don't beleive me about the vehicles then play the first mission where you control Mecury this way: At the start ignore all your objectives and jetpack over to the sensor control station. Here there are three fighter pods. Using the sniper rifle or chain gun kill the pilots without damaging the craft. Once they hit the ground without their pilots you can easily steal them. Notice these are the "enemy" versions of the craft with below standard hit points. The hit points don't matter because you are now invincible, enjoy mowing down every enemy on the level with ease except the tank. This demonstrates the vehicles are WAY to powerful for the single player game and shows another flaw in the game: the shoddy NPC AI. The enemies can't seem to deal with anything that can fly, which in the Tribes universe is everything.

A great example of how fustrating and unbalanced the vehicles are in single player is the mission where you are thrown into a tiny arena and then get surrounded by tanks and gunships that constantly bombard the arena with giant bombs for far more rounds than you are told you have to survive at the begining of the match. People now think I'm insane because of all the screaming and cussing I did as as I was playing this game. There were a few fun moments in the single player game but most of them revloved around the handful of times you actually got to drive vehicles instead of getting killed by them.

The multiplayer doesn't fare much better I'm sorry to say. Theres really nothing new or innovative here and in fact it feels more like a step backwards than forewards. There are only five game types and only 11 maps. Thats pretty lame in comparison to many of the other multiplayer first person shooters out there. Plus most of the maps are so small they seem cramped. This kind of makes sense because getting enough people togeather for a game will probably be hard but you know, BOTS COULD HAVE FIXED THAT.

Theres no giant leaps in the basic gameplay either with only four driveable vehicles and a handful of weapons. The game is still the only first person shooter with jetpacks and skiing but that only goes so far when you figure other games out there, like Planetside, offer huge worlds and dozens of unique vehicles and weapons.

Some people might enjoy Tribes: Vengeance but I can't shake the feeling that a huge oppertunity for a great game was missed here.

"Would be great, but..."
Don't get me wrong. I can tell that this is a great game, with excellent graphics, good gameplay, a good storyline and interesting characters. If you have a fast, modern PC I highly recommend it. However, if you have just an OK, mid-range pc like mine (My pc has a 1 Gigabyte processor and an nVidia Geforce 9.0 graphics card), don't waste your money. I got this game with high expectations; everybody said it was great, and I couldn't wait to try it out. But when I got it and installed it, I found that it had a number of problems that had nothing to do with the game itself, and everything to do with the fact that I didn't have a "perfect" pc. First of all, the loading screen before cutscenes and before each level take about six minutes apiece. Then, once you have waited the little bar to inch its way along the screen and you are dropped into the game, it completely stops for a long time and is jerky for much longer after that. These frame-rate drops happen fairly often during the game, and there is nothing more frustrating thatn waiting forever for your save-game to load and then, when you are finally able to play, having the frame-rate drop to zero with enemies all around you. Many times I have been in the middle of a large firefight and the game lags up as I am fighting for my life. By the time the frame-rate hitches itself back up again, there I am lying on the ground dead. Needless to say, this is extremely frustrating, especially because after this happens I have to wait all over again for the game to load. So, if your computer can handle it, by all means get it. If not, well, be warned.

"Dissapointed..."
I am very dissapointed in this game... It has great graphics on it, but it strayes from what Tribes was originally created for. I'm what players on the game call an "Old School Player" so i have all 3 games in the Tribes Series. I started playing the original tribes back around 1998, before Tribes 2 came out. The original tribes was extremely customizable on your equipement setups and allowed for easy server side modifications to the game. Tribes vengeance you cant... You have 4 slots of equipment to choose from and thats it. You cannot add equipment or special features to make your games unique. You can however make different game rules. The only part of the game i enjoyed was the grapple, being able to act like spiderman and sling shot around was fun for me and I enjoyed it. If i where to choose between the original Tribes, and Tribes: Vengeance, i would choose the original Tribes any day.

"Tribes is back with a Vengeance!"
This the first game in the Tribes series to have an single-player included in it and th SP rocks. I was quite impressed with the way they did it and story was pretty good too. It is also a pretty long one.

In the SP, you play 4 different characters (you also play one chararcter when she was a child) in different times (the story covers something like 4 generations). You go back and forth alot, but the story is still pretty easy to follow. And some of the missions and one on one battles are very challenging. The only annoying thing I experienced in the SP was the trials you had to do later in the game. One of them involved completing 6 laps in the allotted time. I must have done that at least 100 times(I'm not kiiding about this either) before I finally beat it. Other than that, the SP was awesome and very fun.

As for the MP, I am not very impressed. First off, there seems to be very few servers. Not sure if this game just didn't generate enough interest or what, but very few servers and very few people playing it seems to me. But when you get in a server that has a good latency, it is pretty fun. All I have ben able to play though is Capture the Flag.

Graphically, this game is pretty good. The sound effects are even better and you still have 3 classes of armor and there are vehicles you can use plus flying units too.

For the price this is selling at right now too, this is a must buy for any Tribes player, at least for the SP. But you won't be dissappointed.