Reload: Tribes Vengeance

Tribes Vengeance (2004): I never really played Tribes back in the day, and until T:V, my only real experience with the franchise was Starsiege from way back in 1999. I first picked it up for about four quid or something in 2005 after reading some generally positive reviews and having a go at the demo (whilst playing catch up for the previous four years of PC games that I'd missed out on from not upgrading).

At the time, it was actually pretty stunning. Flying round the huge maps by jet pack and skiing down almost vertical slopes at 5000 mph was fantastic fun, even though the weapons were either bit shit or completely redundant. The Unreal 2 engine made everything look lovely and shiny, and the space-opera storyline was actually rather compelling as well, despite being painfully cheesy at times.

It was only when I started exploring the online and multiplayer options that it began to become clear how pissed off most of the Tribes community seemed to be with T:V, the game's developer Irrational and its publisher VU Games. After its launch in 2004, T:V failed to sell for a number of reasons and support for the game was quickly abandoned by VU. Existing Tribes players seemed to think that T:V moved too far away from the original games and stuck with them, rather than moving on to Vengeance. Also, 2004 was not a good year for rebooting PC franchises, with UT2k4 and Half-Life 2 occupying most gamers' free time. I can't help but feel that it was also the beginning of a transition from mainstream online gaming away from PCs and towards XBox Live. If Vengeance had been launched a year later on the 360, perhaps it'd have fared a bit better. In any case, by 2004 there really wasn't room for what was essentially a new online FPS franchise.

The failure of Tribes Vengeance is a pretty sad story overall, and whilst the multiplayer may not have made the grade considering the game was essentially a multiplayer game, the single player campaign is still worth a play through if you haven't tried it before (despite the fact that its really only there to provide training for the multiplayer). The Unreal 2 engine is certainly showing its age, although I still prefer its post-processing to the over-blown plasticiness of the Unreal 3 engine.

As previously mentioned, the T:V storyline is pretty good and Irrational certainly managed to do an impressive job of telling it from various different points of view, switching between the past and present.I doubt there's anyone playing it online these days, but as a single player game, Tribes Vengeance is definitely worth giving a spin if you haven't tried it before, and still worth a replay if you have.