Iâve been putting off reviewing this title for a long time - almost since I started this blog. Not for any particular consistent reason beyond I could never finish the damn game. Not that the game is impossible to beat, just that I kept getting distracted by school or work or another title or some hot chick shaking her cans in my face. The usual stuff.
The Tribes series is much like the Mechwarrior series - a series that features a distant future with great amounts of war, violence, and fucking sweet tech and is consistently fucking screwed over by whoever is running whatever studio that develops it. In this case, Vivendi gave up on the game and just refused to support it despite a good reception from critics and players that probably would have liked the game had it not been screwed by the execs. This title is why the series didnât have a single release for eight years after this game was released in 2004, and that went the unfortunate free-to-play-but-kills-you-with-microtransactions route. Youâll probably be at least passingly familiar with the basics of the universeâs plot - distant future, humanityâs spread among the stars and space travel is casual enough that you can have an empire that spans multiple planets along with the requisite group of semi-barbarian tribals that live out in the boonies. The addition to this standard future FPS universe? Fucking jetpacks. Practical ones, no less! Eat your heart out, Halo. You assholes didnât come up with that until several titles in, these guys had them from the word go!
Iâm getting off topic. Vengeance takes place thousands of years before the start of the previous titles. The story is relatively straightforward - your standard cycle of bloody revenge started after your standard miscommunication and false flag attack after a kidnapping leads to some guy getting stabbed in the brain - but they really try to make it seem complicated by flashing back and forth between the âpresentâ and twenty years previously, with a few random other characters dropping in to play. Unfortunately, the big bad makes it out alive, presumably as a sequel hook for a game that wonât ever be made.
Hilariously, this is one of the few games Iâve seen where player characters will not only fight one another, but you get to off characters that you played as in combat. The game flicks back and forth mostly between the perspective of Victoria, the daughter of the guy I mentioned above who gets his skull perforated, and her daughter Julia. Victoriaâs murder (after she murdered the guy who kidnapped her because heâs the one who stuck a knife in her fatherâs head, but not before he stuck her pretty good himself, ifyouknowwhatImean) by the buddy of the guy she killed leads to her daughter hunting that guy down. Itâs a little silly, but it never quite gets ridiculous. The fact that Juliaâs father is the tribal who kidnapped her mother is treated like a big spoiler in the game, but I doubt if anyone didnât see that one coming from the first scene the two shared. The writing is a little substandard - sure, thereâs no idiotic slang being thrown around like itâs trying to sound hip, but the voice acting feels stilted sometimes and it doesnât mesh well with the graphics.
Speaking of which, the game does show its age, although the particle effects and the explosions do well enough. But oh, god, the faces. Itâs not quite the shovel-face level of C&C Renegade, but I donât recall ever seeing anybody blink, and the eyes are in that uncanny valley level between normal humans and anime characters, making it harder for my brain to classify them as human.
The gameplay is interesting. Obviously, the addition of jetpacks brings a whole new...dimension, shall we say, to the combat, as youâll have good and bad guys flying through the air all firing at one another like a troupe of homicidal acrobats. The weapons are generally meaty and nice but finding ammo for most of them is typically a problem, meaning youâll wind up using whatever the locals are using along with maybe the infinite ammo shotgun (and god BLESS Vivendi for making the infinite ammo weapon a shotgun) and be done with it. Some weapons seem like they would be very useful in a fight, but the levels where they really would come in handy are levels where youâre not allowed to choose your loadout, meaning the seriesâs signature weapon (a gun that fires exploding frisbees) is the best weapon in the game because youâre given access to it all the time and itâs splash damage will compensate for the high speeds of engagements.Â
Another particular bugbear is that the game talks about letting you switch between light, medium, and heavy armor (providing increasing levels of protection and ammo capacity and increasing levels of hampering your mobility) but is very hesitant to actually let you change things up. The part that really got me was when youâre shown a very useful weapon and itâs made into a plot point, before youâre locked into an armor class that canât use it for the rest of the game. There are a few levels where vehicles come into play, but generally youâll be on foot and relying on your jetpack to get around. The gameâs âskiingâ mechanic also improves your mobility, and was one of the greatest ascended bugs of gaming history next to Lara Croftâs cup size.
But is it fun? Oh, my, yes. Even on the levels where I found myself dying repeatedly, I never stopped enjoying the game. I did however get particularly frustrated when I realized that the game does not have an autosave function, nor does it save at the beginnings of levels. So if you say, saved before a major and particularly annoying bossfight, beat that fight, forgot to save at the start of the next level and died due to a mishap, you get to fight that boss all over again.
If you can find it, itâs definitely worth the money. It does work on Windows 8.1, but I canât say whether it would on Windows 10.
