Sound

Kickin' flavor in your ear

T2's sound effects follow the game's philosophy of simply building and improving on the original. Sound effects are very close to what they were, of course being updated to sound better. How much better? Well, to quote the CalBear "the [f'in] mortar blows my ears and shakes my screen"... and CB runs headphones.

Right into the thick of it

Line 'em up

What's even cooler than the awesome sound of the weapons, explosions and items, is that they still sound like the original weapons. A T2 mortar sounds like the original, as does the plasma and disc, but they are much, much beefier and crisper sounding. The plasma gun just sounds amazing when you fire it - it's like a little cannon in your very own room.

Woopsie

Green, rolling hills

The sounds are as functional as they are cool. If you hear a mortar go off too close, turn around quickly to make sure an enemy Juggernaut hasn't dropped a little green Christmas present at your feet. If you're going over a hill behind a sniper, his tell-tale laser sound can help you pin-point him in case you miss the red beam.

Short stairway to heaven...

We were quite thrilled with Tribes 2's music back when playing the beta, though we had some concerns with the limited track selection. Have things changed since then? Not a bit.

The sky looks better without texture compression

Hehe just try and cap

The music is still the great, techno-rock-industrial funky stuff that we played in the beta, quite similar in style to the original Tribes, but sadly, there are still not enough tracks. There are 5 MP3s, each tied to a certain terrain type - badlands, desert, ice, lush and volcanic. Five tracks is too few in any case, but when you consider that there seems to be a disproportionate number of badlands and lush maps (meaning those tracks get played more often), things get even uglier. The music often does suit the terrain, but more, randomly played tracks would be preferable.

Tribes 2 could have had randomly chosen, numbered tracks, and gamers could take their favorite songs and rename them to the appropriate track. Not that you can't stick your favorite song as say "lush.mp3" into the proper directory, but it would suck hearing it over and over again, no? Hey wait, some Red Alert songs are available for download from Westwood...