Tribes: Ascend

[pershainovitsh]

Tribes: Ascend is a sci-fi free-to-play shooter with fast-paced action. Every player has a couple of weapons, a couple of perks, a couple of backpacks (or something like that) and there are only a few gamemodes: team deathmatch, capture the flag, and arena.

Sounds boring, doesn't it? Sounds like any other shooter on the market. Except that every player has a jetpack and skiis (or actually just some fancy stuff that takes away your friction)! So you'll be flying across the maps with jetpacks and going at speeds over 150 km/h with the skiis. Gaining momentum and keeping it takes skill. (which is rare in today's shooters) Although there are assault rifles and shotguns and sniper rifles, there are also some very interesting weapons, like the one I call "disc-gun", which obviously shoots discs. But why would you want to shoot discs if you can have a shotgun or any other traditional weapon? Because the shotgun has a smallish range, the assault rifle has low damage and the sniper rifle... I haven't unlocked the sniper class yet, but I guess it's only good at long range.

When you aim and shoot a disc, it will go to the point you shot it at. It will not drop, and it will not follow enemies. It has pretty high damage (I would say 33% on lightly armoured enemies), and you need some skills (or luck) to know where will the target be at when the disc reaches its destination, and when will the target be close to the ground (since it's extremely difficult to hit a flying target).

And holy cow is it fun. At least the first matches were really fun.
The game takes about 10 gigabytes, and looks good. And it has (three?) vehicles, although I didn't get to see them in multiplayer. But I did give them a test in the tutorial: there's a speed bike, a flying machine and a tank.

tribesascend.com


And on another note, first when I played I had once again the annoying problem that has bothered me in some demos (thankfully not in full games): the character kept spinning to left in a set speed. A quick look at the troubleshooting part of the forums gave me a tip: unplug your joystick (or anything else unneeded that may cause troubles), and it worked!

[swfwebmaster]

[swfwebmaster]

Tribes: Ascend does not look interesting to me. It looks like a spaz fest.

[pershainovitsh]

Some like it, some don't. I think it's a refreshing change from all the serious/realistic shooters like PR, and CoD-style arena shooters where you just kill and die, kill and die with no skill involved. In how many games do you go 150 km/h on foot? (of course you need to build up momentum e.g by skiing downhill to get to a speed like this)

If I didn't mention it before, Tribes: Ascend is right now in its open beta, and will be free to play in the future, just like it is now. You can, however, buy xp boosts for real money, but there is nothing that can be bought with money and cannot be bought with in-game xp points. So it's not pay-to-win like these free-to-play games tend to be.

[backtothefight64]

To be honest with you I just enjoyed seeing the phrase 'spaz fest' !

As for the game it looks like its moved bunnyhopping to a whole new level.
On the plus side the graphics and environments look good, but I think it could induce motion sickness.

[pershainovitsh]

Motion could indeed be a problem, although I didn't notice anything. But I don't get seasick or anything like that very easily. (although once I got a little sick for waving to the left and to the right in front of the huge hologram poster of Bob Marley on my wall)

More info: the installer, which you have to download, is about 2 gigs in size. When you have completely installed the game, it takes 10 gigs, making it the second biggest game on my computer, the biggest being the demo of Take On Helicopters. (which is 12 gigs, and made by Bohemia with the Arma engine)

[swfwebmaster]

Feb 29, 2012 16:25:19 GMT 1 backtothefight64 said:

... could induce motion sickness.

Yes, I have a Tribes PS2 game and did not enjoy the motion sickness.

[pershainovitsh]

The game promotes teamwork in several ways. In Capture the Flag (the game's main mode, each team has a flag the other team wants to take, first team to get five captures wins) it's obvious the flag carrier needs protection from the enemies trying to kill him. But that's just the most obvious example of teamwork.

The Infiltator

Some of the classes actually work like the ones in Battlefield 2. There's the Infiltrator, which is very much like the Special Forces class in BF2. Both have a silenced carbine/SMG, a silenced pistol, and means to destroy enemy equipment. The Infiltrator uses sticky grenades to destroy enemy turrets, radars and generators. If you destroy the enemy generator (hidden deep beneath the enemy base and usually very well guarded), the enemy turrets, both deployable and static, will stop working, as well as the enemy radar and the vehicle station, which is used to buy vehicles.

And the Infiltrator can turn invisible for a short time. It uses your energy, so you can't really use the jetpack that much while being invisible. But of course being impossible to see (unless you shoot, get shot at or exceed a certain speed I can't remember) is very handy. Especially when destroying enemy generators and waiting for the enmy technicians tocome and repair.

The Technician

But what do you do when your team's generator is down? Just like in BF2, where you called for an engineer to repair the damage, you call a Technician in Tribes: Ascend. He has a weak and inaccurate SMG, a powerful repair tool and a deployable turret. With the repair tool you can repair any damage done to a generator, turret, vehicle or radar.

When you upgrade the deployable turret with the use of experience points, you can make it lock on to targets faster, get the ability to have two active in the same time, and make it more effective against armor.

How other classes contribute to the team

One of the heavy classes has a deployable energy shield, which can be placed for example in front of the map or in a chokepoint. The faster the enemy goes through the shield, the more damage he gets. The Techician can repair these shields if they get damaged, but not destroyed.

Vehicles

You can buy vehicles from a vehicle station if the genrator is online. You buy them with in-game money, which you get from killing, repairing, taking flags etc. These points are reset to zero when the round ends.
There are three vehciles: a hoverbike, a tank, and an aircraft. All of them are equipped with some kind of weapons, and all of them have boosts.

If you have a friend, you could try some cool flag-capturing tactics with vehicles. While driving, you cannot capture the flag. But what if you let your friend skii to the flag, and he gets in your aircraft just after he grabs the flag?

Sadly vehicles are rarely used, even if the hoverbike is quite cheap.

Stuff you can call in

If you get enough points, you can use a laser designator to call in an ammo station, an air strike, or an even more powerful air strike. Everyone can see the laser, so it can be difficult to laze the enemy base for example.

Upgrading

You can upgrade your classes with experience points, but you can upgrade turrets, generators and radars with the in-match currency. After a few levels (1500 for one level) the turrets become extremely tough to destroy, at least for me.