Qlmmb2086

This game is "Pipes" with a lot of time pressure and enemy dodging. Nothing more, nothing less. Injecting story and polish into the sort of game one might be tasked to put together as computer science midterm project is not enough to redeem the unoriginal concept and frustrating control scheme.

After about a month of this game, I think I have played enough to form a proper opinion. Tribes: Ascend has two severely conflicting features. It has the Tribes game mechanic, which are incredible, and it has the Free to Pay scheme, which is terrible. If everyone was equal, this would be a truly amazing game. Combat is fast-paced, based entirely around accuracy and split-second timing, and has rich tactics. The classes all play differently in a good way, and excel in different situations, and different weapons can be used differently depending on your environment and range to target. Unfortunately, you don't get to any of that unless you spend money on the game. You start with three classes, and those classes in turn start with less health, less energy regeneration, less ammo, less weapons, and less perks than anyone who has paid into the game, even if they're using the same class that you are. For being "not pay to win," this is surprisingly noticeable in the game. In theory, everyone would be able to unlock weapons through "experience points" at a reasonable rate, but unfortunately the way Hi-Rez has weighted the costs of the items, it takes (litterally) about 300 matches at 20 to 30 minutes each to unlock ONE new weapon, never mind classes, perks, armor upgrades, and upgrades the weapons you've unlocked. That's right; it takes well over one HUNDRED hours of play time to get a single weapon. Grand total cost to unlock everything (currently) in the game directly? About $150. And that's only currently existing items; expect more to be added faster than you can unlock them at your pitiful one-weapon-per-month rate with free points alone. Because different weapons are better in different situations, "all weapons are good in some way." Unfortunately, all weapons are also BAD in some way... usually some way that is extremely easily exploitable by someone using... you guessed it: a weapon they paid money to unlock. The real issue isn't the different weapon matchups; the issue is that the combat in the game is 90% about switching weapons, classes, and loadouts to exploit your opponent's weakness, which is literally impossible to do without paying money into the game. As a result, spending money on the game gives you a clear advantage, which is the one thing Free to Pay schemes should never do, from a gameplay standpoint. To be fair, this wouldn't be a problem if it was consistent. The problem lies in the fact that some people are earning their way up the ladder, while other people bought the weapons and classes directly, and then simply spend all their XP on upgrades so that even if you DO get the same class and weapon, their version of the class is STILL more powerful than yours. Technically, you can unlock everything in the game with XP. But you won't. You won't even come close. The most generous estimate my calculator gives me is that it takes about 1250 hours of matchmaking to unlock everything in Tribes: Ascend without any payments. That's six months solid if you treat the game like a full-time job. And by then, you'd have to start over on everything that had been added to the game since. TL;DR: Great game mechanics, but expect 9 out of 10 of your deaths to be from someone using a weapon you haven't unlocked yet and probably never will.