Tribes Ascend

[Calneon]

If you've never heard of Tribes, it's a fast paced competitive FPS game that was very popular back when it was released. I never played it myself, but I've been playing the Tribes Ascend beta a bit over Christmas and it's a lot of fun.

It's very old school, and very skill based. The two core mechanics are the fact you can 'Ski' over the ground, which means if the ground is flat, you won't lose or gain any speed, but you also can't turn much at all. You also have a jetpack which has a short energy limit of about 5 seconds per use, and a quick recharge time. To gain speed you have to ski down hills, and then jetpack up hills to keep your speed, and if you repeat this, you'll gain tremendous momentum that you can use to catch up to enemies, outrun enemies, capture the flag, etc...

The main mode is CTF, where you have dedicated flag cappers who use their speed to get in and out of the enemy base as fast as possible. There are about 12 different classes, with different guns, armour, and speed values, some make great flag runners and other make great defenders. You also build up credits as you kill enemies/cap flags, which you can spend on vehicles.

To give you an example of the skill involved in competitive Tribes, this is a video of three players coordinating on a team to get the flag away from the enemy base...



Flag swapping confuses the enemy chasers and causes them to have to change direction, losing any momentum they built up chasing the other guy.

Tribes Ascend will be F2P, based around a gold system which allows you to buy new classes and upgrade them (you can also do this using credits you earn by playing). Definitely a game to keep an eye on, and a nice change from the modern warfare style games we've been plagued with recently.

[Chalex4]

Looks really cool actually. As you say, a nice break from the current direction games are taking.

It is actually an FPS game, which the video above doesn't really show. Graphs are also pretty good on some other videos I saw.