We got the chance to play Hi-Rez Studios’ first person shooter Tribes Ascend upon our return from the Christmas holidays; we were happy to find out that the game is still live and kicking and received a new content update a few weeks ago including a few extra maps. Obviously being well aware of the title we’ve never actually had the opportuninty to play it, thankfully that has changed and we took a few hours out to play the game and see what it was all about. A few years under its belt now since its 2012 April release, we figured the game might be wearing a little thin, but we have to say that graphically and gameplay wise the shooter really seems to hold up pretty well.

We bypassed most of the tutorials but ensured to take some time to run through the Skiing tutorial, skiing is a vital part of gameplay and involves fast paced movement around the map to help you get about and pursue (or flee…) enemies. Using the spacebar your character instantlyu starts skiing, gliding along the floor in a generally straight direction and picks up a lot of speed when going downhill (and slows down going uphill) but offers minimal mobility and turning speed. Combined with your jetpack (shift button) you can jump up hills, scale cliffs, and use it in combination with your skiing and constant forward momentum to really speed around the maps. It isn’t too difficult to get to grips with, but perfecting it is a bit of an art form and being able to ski and shoot is definitely a little on the tricky side.

The rest of the controls were fairly standard (WASD, camera/aiming on mouse) and so we jumped into a Quickmatch, able to choose from three classes: light, medium and heavy, they essentially determined our loadout, armor and top speed we could reach whilst skiing. Each class has multiple weapons, which came in really handy, and are situational enough that some are better for long range, others for clearing groups such as your grenade launcher, whereas other like your shotgun or machine gun work better for fast moving close up targets. You have nine potential loadouts available now, a new addition, but as new level 1 players we didn’t have much gear to speak of to even kit out more than one loadout!

The game started off by throwing us into a snowy map, a capture the flag game with us versus another guys in a 1 on 1, this gave us time to work out the controls, get a little more experience with skiing and actually engaging in some combat. This particular Capture Flag game was a capture and hold, pick up the flag and earn points for keeping hold of it, taking a death reduced your 125 team lives, which would end the game or if the game reached its 25 minute timer (which is pretty much always does as the servers just weren’t that busy). We were a little concerned that we were just going to end up in constant 1 on 1’s on these huge maps, fortunately after a while people started joining the match and the battles became a little more interesting. Unfortunately for the enemy latecomers I’d already been kicking the lone players ass for a good ten minutes and had a huge lead in the score as I’d pretty much kept in possession of the flag (from easy evasion on the large map to simply out-gunning the other dude); it was pretty unlikely that they would catch up.

However, one of the good things about the game is that once you are all in a game and it ends, the same people are automatically taken into the next match with you so you don’t have to queue again and wait for new people. So, as our matches continued our numbers padded out a lot more making combat more fun and tactical, for the most part. The matchmaking wasn’t too bad, we were getting up to level 7 players joining (level 60 is max) so people that were more experienced but far beyond it being a one sided wipe. Team work was hit and miss, so often we would find ourselves with the flag (the game seemed to keep putting us in Capture Flag games) and alone with the enemy pursuing us whilst my team were being kept occupied elsewhere by a few people. This seemed quite common as shouts of “Where the **** is my team?!” from an enemy team member were quite frequent over chat, haha!

The matches are really fast paced and the skiing mechanic is lots of fun, blitzing it around the map at speed is great, though we can’t seeing it being as useful in other game modes where you don’t have to constantly keep away from people. On the flip side there are plenty of structures on the map and various landmarks that aren’t too useful in capture flag (at least at our level) as it seems more beneficial to just keep moving than staying at one spot, though the occasional gunfight would break out which was pretty cool.

Of the new maps we only got a chance to try out Perdition, Quickmatch maps were random and checking over the custom made games they were either being made out of our level range or just with no people playing them. We thought we’d gotten lucky being thrown into a Perdition map quickmatch; an alpine mountain-esq type map with two main bases with turrets, a small lake each that had a platform in the middle and housed your team flag, only this time it was a classic Capture Flag where you needed to take the enemy flag and get it to your own. This could have been fun, but it looked like we were in a fresh room and it was us versus two other players, so outnumbered on this small map with quick respawn times it was extremely difficult to stay alive or even consider the objective (where the other two could defend and attack at the same time). We got a little bit salty after about five minutes of one sided ganking and just quit the match, but we’re sure at higher levels the population pads out a little more so these types of matches aren’t as common.

Overall our few hours playing were fun, the skiing is a unique and subtle mechanic but really makes things a hell of a lot more fast paced and pursuing a lone flag holder with your team is like hunting down prey as a pack of wolves and is pretty exciting. We’re happy the game is still getting attention as it’s not one that should go unplayed or unnoticed considering its free to play cost.

SCORE

• Graphics: 7


• Performance: 8


• Gameplay: 7

• Pros: Unique skiing movement makes gameplay at break neck speeds, numerous weapons per class, lots of maps on multiple modes.


• Cons: Not a huge population, doesn’t seem to be much in the way of matchmaking and low level players can be up against high levels, imbalanced numbers on teams is common and annoying.

Final Score: 7.5

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