Interface

Fun with menus

Tribes 2 has quite possibly the best and most complete user interface for a shooter yet. If anything, it resembles an operating system, not a game's main menu. There are various backgrounds, you can open and close windows, resize pop-ups and there's even a "Start"-like menu.

My main man

Gotta love that news

Multiplayer gaming is all about the community, and Tribes 2 goes far beyond what any other game has done to improve community relations. A big news section is available in-game, to see the latest word from the developers, while there are forums, email, chat and a browser for players too. Currently the forums, email and browser are down as Dynamix tries to recover from the instant-success of their game (when will developers EVER learn? Have 10 times as many servers as you planned for release...)

The forums are a great resource

Thanks for sharing strategies on how to TEAM KILL!

While these features will be ignored by many, for others they can be essential. Planning Tribe events via email, getting together with teammates in an IRC channel and reading up on problems/strategies in the forums are all tasks that are much easier now, since they are in-game.

The low-down

There are a few niggling problems with the interface, however. For one, the in-game server browser is less-than-fast. In fact, it might be described as sluggish at times. Though there are, at the moment, less than 1000 servers to play on, pinging and querying each takes too long. The game handles non-responsive servers quite well (never lingering too long on them), but otherwise fails to impress with its speed.

w00t. Starwolf logo.

One of my fave maps

Other browser annoyances include a disappointing filter selection (why can I not just ping my favorites?), and the lack of a "stop" button to stop ping/query, so you can select and launch a game without it bouncing around your screen. Double-clicking a server provides information on it, which is a touch counter-intuitive, as you'd expect the game to launch with such a command.

In the game

The game interface, HUD layout and menus are quite good. Controls are slightly different from your stock FPS configuration - instead of WASD, you used ESDF. Remapping is quite easy as the commands are self-explanatory. The best part is that the commands are extremely useful. You no longer linger in front of an inventory station picking out what you want, but rather you hit your keypad "Enter" button, select a layout (or pick the numbers 1-9 and ctrl+1-9 for a pre-selected class), and enter the inventory station - 1 second later, you're done and ready to go. The lineups for inventory have been greatly reduced, as you can imagine. The only disappointment we had was the voting menu, since this requires leaving the game completely to call a vote on team damage, kicking someone, or a map. Counter-Strike style menus would be more welcome, but this is only a small annoyance.