Tribes: Vengeance Preview

I always hate the period of time after a hot new game comes out. It's such sweet torture, the time between the announcement that a game has gone Gold till the time you finally have your own copy and you are installing it. It's a thrill that is only comparable to when I was little and was waiting on Christmas Eve for morning to come so I could tear into my waiting presents. I knew that lurking on the other side of that final twelve hour wait and the surge of pure joy and adrenaline brought on by the anticipation of the unknown, there was a palatable absence of the anticipation I had been enduring (and grown to love).

So what now? Are you gonna draw your pistols or whistle 'Dixie'?

She said deep shaft... heh, heh.

The boy has grown up (Yeah, right. - Ed) and the toys have changed (Oh you got that right. - Ed) but the anticipation is still there. As is the ache the anticipation leaves once you finally have the game in hand.
Case in point: Doom 3. It has been only a week and half since the game hit store shelves and I got my copy. While I was happy to get the game installed on my system, I found that in the back of my mind I knew that all the weeks I had spent asking, "When is Doom 3 coming out?" was going to be replaced with "It's here. Now what? What's the next Big Thing?". I am not kidding. That thought was practically screaming at me last Monday. I was starting to feel depressed. With everything else that is going on in the world, I am reduced to waiting for next Big Thing in video games to define my happiness for me. I think I am going to contact a psychologist and have him explore this irrational behavior just so I can have a mental illness or syndrome named after me.

What brought me out of my funk came on Friday when completely unannounced I got an envelope in the mail from Vivendi. I had not been contacted by any PR reps before hand so I was unsure what was in the package. My curiosity quickly turned to elation when after tearing open the manila envelope I found that inside was a DVD with the latest build of Single Player portion of Tribes: Vengeance. Here it was! The next Big Thing was here! I could stop taking antidepressants and start gaming like I was meant to.

I wasted no time installing the game and fired it up as soon as it was patched. While I waited for the two plus gig install to complete I started scanning the documentation that came with the disc. Since Viviendi had gotten me into the Multiplayer Beta a little while back (and I love it, even in its current Beta form), I have been curious about the single player aspect of the game. Were they going to try for an actual storyline or just the multiplayer maps with bots that had lackluster AI like Tribes 2? Would the single player experience be able to capture the chaos and fun that Tribes has been known for? I intended to find out.

As I launched the game, I was treated to the same menu screen I was familiar with from the multiplayer Beta. The only difference was that the Single Player button was enabled on this screen. No big surprises here. However, once I selected the Single Player button and started a new game, an intro movie that was done with the in game engine begin telling the story of two Tribes warriors, a man on the ground in Heavy armor who has been critically wounded and a female teammate who is listening to his final words. As he talks of a betrayal that has befallen their Tribe, he hands the woman a data disc and we are whisked twenty years into the past.

The scene change brings us to a large space ship that is in deep space. As we close in on the ship, we hear conversation between a high-ranking member of the Empire and another official as they wait for Princess Victoria to arrive. A third person sits at the table with the men. We soon learn that Princess Victoria is the daughter of the high-ranking official and she is pledge to marry the second man. The third person is Princess Olivia, Victoria's older, wiser and less attractive sister.

I was struck at first by how richly detailed the textures and colors were on the surrounding environments and the characters themselves. The next thing I noticed however was the faces of the characters and their animations in the opening movie appeared stiff and did not look very good. After playing Doom 3 for the past week or so, I can understand why I would react like this at first, but as I got wrapped up in the game and its story, I found myself being much less critical.

As soon as Princess Victoria makes her entrance it's made clear that she is not happy with the fact that she is to be married off to this man for political reasons and she is a spoiled brat. After she storms from the room having thrown a hissy fit, Princess Olivia follows her and succeeds in calming her down. Leaving Victoria alone to compose herself, Olivia departs and leaves her sister to gaze out the window as the movie ends and the game begins.

Starting in the same room Victoria was left in at the end of the opening movie, the solitude is soon broken by explosions and a warning klaxon. The ship has been boarded by Tribal raiders and security is scrambling to secure the important passengers from harm. Your first duty is to get yourself, Princess Victoria, to safety. That's right, you are playing Miss Hissy Fit herself. Through a series of radio broadcasts, you sister, Olivia guides you through the ship's access hatches and service corridors to try to avoid the raiding Tribesmen. As you progress though the ship, you are given a tutorial on how to access inventory stations, equip armor and weapons, use your suit's jump jets and engage in combat. The setting of having a powder puff princess having to flee for her life makes a perfect setting for the tutorial. The comments and complaints Victoria voices as she is forced to run for her life are sometimes comical and do a good job of evoking sympathy for a character who was at first pass, a complete bitch.

After you have made your way though the ship to the escape pods and it looks as though your freedom is assured, the final escape pod jettisons without you and you are soon captured by the Tribal barbarians you were trying to avoid. The leader is a good-looking rogue named Daniel who seems to be a bit more civilized than the other ruffians that are sweeping the ship. At the very least, he realizes that a princess is worth more as a ransom than a normal prisoner of war.

When you wake up some time later, you are in a cavern and Daniel is instructing you via radio that in order for you to get out of this prison you must get through a series of checkpoints. This serves as the next part of the tutorial and serves two purposes: First, it gets you aquatinted with more advanced control techniques like 'Skiing' (where you hold down the space bar and use your jets to rapidly move across terrain) and second, it gives you training on how to navigate using the radar on your HUD in three dimensional space (a MUST for the multiplayer game). Again, the game presents the training in a fashion that blends well with the storyline and allows you to learn a bit more about the characters. I also slowly became aware that even though this was the single player content of Tribes: Vengeance, the game was priming you for the multiplayer side of the game, but doing so in a fashion that was entertaining enough to stand on its own.

After Victoria had escaped the caves, she has to switch on some monitoring equipment at a series of towers on the way back to the Tribal base. She accompanies another member of the Tribe and along the way, they stumble into an ambush of Blood Eagle troops. As I was soaring about trying to avoid getting hit while firing at other enemies, my captor and the ambush party were trading insults over the radio. As I was madly dashing back to the safety of a bunker on my map, the men I was fighting against would taunt me after scoring a hit or would scream in rage and pain as I brought down their allies. It was invigorating to soar over the open plains and small ponds as machine gun fire and spinfusor discs whipped back and forth.