Starsiege Tribes: The Review

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Starsiege Tribes

Tribes is the first ONLINE ONLY first person tribe warfare title. The game is a spinoff set in the FAR future of the Sierra/Dynamix's "Siege" series. Descendants of human colonists have splintered into a multitude of different tribes, with four: the Diamond Sword, Starwolf, Blood Eagle, and Children of the Phoenix, being the largest and most predominant. Having abandoned the large and cumbersome Hercs for smaller, but equally heavily-armed combat suits, each tribe develops its own culture, ways, and battle tactics. Their objective however remains the same: To establish their supremacy over all other tribes.

This isn't your run-of-the-mill kill everything in site frag fest, even though it can be. Starsiege Tribes encourages TEAMWORK, a concept previously unheard of in online first-person shooters. To play such missions as:

Capture and Hold: Capturing and holding key locations while preventing them from being captured by the other team.
Defend and Destroy: Protect your base from the enemy, attack theirs. Simple enough, eh...?
Find and Retrieve: Find items scattered around the field and return them to your team's pedestal
Deathmatch: I'm sure we're all familiar with the concept now.
And my personal favortie,
Capture the Flag: Each team has a base which they must defend. Then raid the other team's base and attempt to capture their flag, and bring it back to yours.

With the exception of D-Matches, all these modes of play will require teamwork, or some semblence of it, if you wish to succeed. In CTF for example, its pretty freakin' hard to get their flag back to your base when you've got two or three of them on your tail, chucking grenades in your path and reigning bullets down on your head. The solution? Have some teammates wait outside the base to help secure your escape. YES, PROTECT ME MY SACRIFICIAL LAMBS, BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!....*ahem* Sorry.

GRAPHICS: Beautiful, even on a mid-level pentium w/ accelerator the games runs at a smooth framerate at 640 X 480 res.

SOUND: Rock/techno soundtrack isn't memorable, but remains relatively unobtrusive during play. Sound effects, especially gunfire and explosions, is on right on cue.

CONTROL: Keys default settings are already serviceable, but can always be reconfigured. Plays just like most other FPS games.

GAMEPLAY: While there will always be @$$#*les who will want to ruin the co-op modes of play for the rest of us (Thats why theirs a D-Match mode you *&#$), there will (should?) always be an abundance of players you can work with. Whether you deceide to go your own, just jump in a server and "play" or really immerse yourself by starting/joining your own tribe, its all good. And thats the greatest thing about Tribes, whatever type of game you like, you can play and enjoy, cuz its just plain fun.

GRAPHICS: 9 SOUND: 7 CONTROL: 9 GAMEPLAY: 10 OVERALL: 9

ONLINE CO-OP PLAY LIVES! Now bring on Team Fortress.

-Ragnarok the Red

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