Tribes Review

Graphics

Thresh's comments in BLACK

CalBear's comments in BLUE

Graphical Glory

Thresh:
Tribes has a brand-new, pimped out graphics engine. Fighting happens both indoors and outdoors and the game looks pretty fluid either way. The outdoor areas, unlike TF, don't seem as if they're slapped together from an engine that wasn't designed to see sunlight or mountains. When I'm running through the great outdoors, I really got a sense of the vast expanses that many of the Tribes maps feature. When you approach a building, it slowly comes into focus rather than just jumping out at you. The landscape is pretty detailed, with lots of rolling hills, and random dips. It's in fact possible to use the features of the land to mask troop movements or approaches to the enemy base. However, the fact that players are denoted by green and red arrows above their heads (green for friends, red for enemies) does a lot to prevent any super stealthy base infiltration.

The green/red arrows make friend and foe (too) easy to discern

The base interiors have standard high-tech metal textures, and there aren't too many complicated items lying around to get in the way while fighting. The only furnishings are the required inventory, ammo, and command stations, along with an occassional elevator and turret. There's genius in simplicity, and I'm glad the designers kept that in mind before cluttering everything up with useless details that don't do anything. After all, when your entire game is based on gameplay, you'd better not have any useless crap lying around.

CalBear:

I agree for the most part. The engine does do a great job about modeling and portraying large outdoor areas and does a decent job on the base interiors also. The widely varying landscapes on the maps were a nice touch too. It's a good change of pace to go from gently rolling hills to steep mountainous terrain, to flat desert land. One thing that bugs me is that there are no trees or foliage in the outdoors! Maybe it would have been too much of a drain on the framerate but I think forested areas where you can hide in or snipe from would have been nice. Having realistic looking scenery does a lot for suspension of disbelief, but the land in Tribes sometimes seemed like painted moonscapes. I get a really naked feeling when standing outdoors, as though there's no place to hide. If I even stop for a second to check my map, I often get my head taken off by a laser sniper. I guess maybe that's realistic for a war situation but if they were aiming for realism, a few trees to hide in would have been nice.

Aren't there any trees on these planets?

I also thought the base interiors were really sparse. I acknowledge that keeping things simpler is more conducive to one on one fighting but after playing games like Half Life and Thief, walking around the bases of Tribes felt like I was playing an unfinished game. The artwork and overall look of the base interior is done well but aside from the inventory stations, there's about zero interactivity with the environment. Heck, there aren't even any doors to operate! Maybe picking up Tribes immediately after Thief put me in the wrong frame of mind but the lack of objects in the environment left me wanting more.