Starsiege Tribes

"A wonderful Online Game"

Tribes is a great multiplayer game. This game offers no legitimate single player mode, so if you don't have permanent internet access; it's not a good idea for you.

Tribes includes several weapons; blaster, plasma gun, chain gun, disc launcher, grenade launcher, Laser Rifle, ELF gun, and mortar launcher. IN addition, you can carry normal throwing grenades and deployable mines. There’s also one fighting vehicle and two transport vehicles. What separates it from other games of the type is the jetpack, which gives you limited flight ability. In a public multiplayer server, you’ll typically have 12 people on each team fighting in one of many forms of play; Capture the flag, find and retrieve, capture and hold to name a few. Each map is noticeably different from other maps.

The biggest set back to this game is the multiplayer option only. If you don’t have enough online time to get good at this game, you’ll often find yourself frustrated. Furthermore, if you have a dial-up connection or otherwise bad ping, you’re going to have a much more difficult getting good with some of the weapons; chain gun and laser rifle to name a few.

The graphics for Tribes are a little shaking. The body of the character is in fact not always the size of the displayed body, which is at times chunky looking. The textures look good, in glide video at least. It’s easy enough to find players as they get an arrow over their head when in range, though there are a few ways to block the arrow for a while via objects in the game.

Tribes is a team game, first and foremost. Unless you’re extremely good, you’re not going to be able to carry a team that fights among itself. The last thing you want to do is fight with your own team rather than the other team.

Sound: The sound effects are very good, there are ten default voices, five male, five female that come with the game. You can download hundreds of other sound packs, voices, and quick chat scripts. The only music for the game is whatever CD you happen to have in your drive.
9/10

Graphics: As mentioned before, a bit limited, but overall it looks very good besides extreme close-ups on other players.
9/10

Game Play: Scripts and various other help programs can be downloaded to make certain tasks easier. The game itself can be customized for what key you would like to have control which action. You can invert your mouse too if you like. Once you learn how to become very mobile; via skiing and taking routes, you’ve already conquered the hardest part of the game.

10/10

Replay value- Since there’s not plot outside of the instruction manual, which was a good story premise, I’d say there’s a high replay value. The fact that online players adapt early and often keeps all gamers on a constant increase of skill.
9/10

This game can still be bought at most any computer game store, the price is down fewer than twenty dollars too, it’s a really good investment and I hope that you’d pick it up.

Overall: 9/10

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 05/11/02, Updated 05/11/02