Tribes Aerial Assault

Pros • Large outdoor arenas, and lots of maps • Vehicles! • Zippy server response and solid coding • All this and good graphics too • There's even an offline solo component • Saveable character profiles • Jetpacking is just too cool for words • Lots of match types	Cons • Keyboard and mouse is still the best way to control a shooter • You could really use the ability to talk to the other players • Maps could use descriptions
Bottom Line Tribes 2 is an excellent choice to break in your PS2 network adaptor. PC gaming has spent years perfecting the online shooter. A lot of that trailblazing has been done by the Tribes series, with its massive outdoor environments, team play, and vehicles. Then along come the online consoles and swoop up all those years of research, design and game testing, and drop it into their first generation of online products. Hardly seems fair, does it? Players of Tribes Aerial Assault probably won't give too much thought to this. They'll be having too much fun.

Because it's a first party game, plus it comes with that groovy headset, SOCOM is probably going to steal a lot of the attention allotted to PS2 online action shooters. But I would urge people not to ignore Tribes Aerial Assault. Sierra really got the touchdown here, and if this is any model for how online gaming on the PS2 is going to go, the future is so bright I need to wear a welding mask.

So what's the deal? Basically, it's a first person sci-fi shooter, fought over enormous maps with up to 16 players at a time. Though the levels are huge, you can cross them very quickly through bursts of your jetpack. You'll soon discover that running is something you do in short spurts if you're smart. If you want to survive, you'll take to the air so much you'll feel like you're deathmatching with Superman. Plus, Tribes throws in some really fun vehicles, different match types, and it looks pretty darn good to begin with. TAA is an awesome online gaming package that you won't get bored of any time soon.

You start the game by creating a player profile. You can be male, female, or a Bioderm, a creature you'll be familiar with if you've played any of the EarthSiege games. If not, never mind, they're just monstrous-looking badasses. You can pick different types of armor that offer more protection and allow you to mount heavier weapons, but at the cost of limiting your mobility and the kinds of vehicles you can use. You can select different backpacks with different specialty equipment (satchel charges, portable turrets). You can change skin types, and name your player. In my case, I always play online games under some variation of the name "Jester" (Amusing side note: upon blowing up a player named "Yomama," the game informed me that "Jester nailed Yomama."). In effect, the game almost lets you pick a character class, making it more complex than most shooters already.

The match types are Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Capture and Hold (capture forts and things and try to keep the enemy from taking them back), and my personal favourite, Hunters (killed player leaves a flag behind, which you can take to a station to score additional points). There are team versions of most games. Like the PC version, the game really shines in teamplay. The maps are very large, with things like equipment stations you can use to reload or change equipment, flag stations guarded by automated turrets, and so on. In these team modes, having an actual strategy makes it much easier to get things done, rather than blindly rushing in.

Though consoles have a reputation for making "lighter" games than what you find on a PC, you wouldn't know it to look at TAA. It has such nifty options as "voting," where players can propose and vote on whether or not to change a map. You can change the time limit, password protect your game so that only invited players get in, add bots and set their intelligence, enable or disable vehicles, and so on. If you're joining a game, you can sort servers by different criteria to find the game you want to play (and there are lots of games out there at this writing). They've provided a very comprehensive set of options for you, worthy of any online PC game.

Server response on my broadband connection has been excellent. Even with the huge maps and potentially 16 players a pop, the frame rate stayed high. I only had one game marred with lag. Generally speaking, the game has flown, and technical issues have almost never stood in the way of my having fun or making a kill. Smooth performance is something you'll be relieved to hear about if you've followed Tribes on the PC--both games required extensive patching before they could really shine, and of course, that's not an option here. Code in TAA has been solid. I do believe it has been a little generous with assessing suicide penalties on me twice, but that point is arguable.

Up to 16 players can be in a single game, and two people can play at a single PS2. There is some single player value to the game, too. You can set up bot matches and play against the solo (bots are REALLY dangerous with the AI cranked, and even at their dumbest settings they're pretty good), or play a "campaign." The campaign is really just training for the multiplayer game, a thin story woven around the different matches. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you can play online, you'll probably ignore the single player stuff.

If TAA has a fault, it lies in the universal and inescapable fact that a mouse and keyboard is still the optimal way to control a shooter. TAA's precision isn't bad, but there is better (Halo, in my opinion, still offers the best console shooter control). You can leave auto-aiming on when you host a game, but most serious players I find usually turn that off. Also, without a keyboard and mouse, or indeed, any kind of built in player forum, how do you plan any strategy during the game? It has to be worked out before hand in some other forum.

Ok, one other minor beef. The maps have no descriptions, which can be annoying if you're looking for a certain type. On a more positive related note, the game certainly comes with lots of maps.

Tribes AA is not just a mindless shooter where you kill aimlessly. Wise teams will assault an enemy tower by destroying its generator first, which will take away the power from the base's turrets. Going on foot to the enemy flag station is usually suicidal, and flying is not much safer. However, rocketing to it in a Mongoose Grav Cycle is not only safer, it's a lot of fun. So is getting into a Hammer Bomber and pelting the enemy forces below, or getting the whole gang into a Piltdown transport and playing Chicken. There's so much to do, and you can even go back to straight up deathmatching if you really want. And that's enjoyable too, and different from other shooters. Get used to picking things off in the air, while you're in the air. Oh, and because most of the weapons fire with a timing element different than most shooters, skill as opposed to volume of fire is the dominant factor in who walks away from a confrontation.

If you want to get online and play action games against other people, Tribes Aerial Assault is a must. The consoles have never seen anything like it before.

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