In an age where more and more games strive for realism, Tron 2.0 really is a breath of fresh air, moving as far away from reality as one can get. It really is a fun, inventive experience, but not without it’s share of problems. The premise is as follows, you are Jet Bradley, a low level game programmer working at a high tech company down on its luck. One day you receive a phone call from your father, who is a high level programmer at the same company, and the call is cut off as you hear signs of a struggle on the other end. You rush to your father’s digitizing laboratory, to find him gone, when suddenly you are “digitized” (turned into data and streamed into the computer) yourself. From there, the AI system Ma3a enlists your help in battling corruption threatening to destroy the system, and the plot unfolds from there. The basic gameplay deviates from the norm of “run and gun” shooters. Instead of a collection of various machine guns, for the first few levels you utilize a disc you throw at enemies. You are also able to block the discs thrown at you by enemy ICPs, making for a skillful duel with each of these enemies. Later you uncover other more potent weapons, such as the LOL, a sniper rifle like laser rifle, a ball launcher, and a cluster disc which explodes on impact, though the disc is probably the most useful weapon in the game. When you toss your disc, you can control it in midair, and recall it whenever you wish, sort of like a boomerang. There are also upgrades and powerups you can access, such as increasing the range of your jumping, adding armor to your character, or a stealth upgrade that allows you to walk and run much quieter. The catch is you can only equip a few of these upgrades at once. Inventory is managed through a screen with two concentric circles, one containing all the weapons and powerups, and the other with slots for you to equip the upgrades, into the categories of Combat, Defense, and Utility. Each level has different “memory requirements” which limit the amount of powerups you can equip in that level. Each upgrade also has three levels, Alpha, Beta, and Gold. Alpha takes up three inventory slots, Beta two, and Gold one, with each level dealing out more damage than the last, but increasing the energy drain. All weapons, aside from the standard disc, sap energy from your energy bar. There is also an RPG like system for upgrading stats. Within each level, there are “build points” hidden throughout the level, which increase your character’s version number. Everytime you pass another digit, such as 2.0, 3.0, etc, you are able to upgrade your characters pool of stats, broken into Health, Energy, Weapon Efficiency, Transfer Rate, and Processor with a limited number of points per gained level, adding a bit of RPG strategy to the game. The gameplay system does work well for the most part, but it isn’t without annoyances. First off, the difficulty is quite high for all but veteran FPS players, even on the normal setting. Expect to reload quite often. Enemies do a lot of damage, so it is easy to be overwhelmed at times. For those craving a challenge it will be quite enjoyable, but for FPS newbies the difficulty may frustrate and annoy them. There are also some platforming sections in the game, and while jumping is easier than in most other FPS games, some of the more acrobatic maneuvers will cause you to plummet to your death, and can get very frustrating. When will developers learn that jump a thons in FPS games are much more frustrating than worthwhile? There is also a great deal of exploration in the game, as you gain upgrades, permissions (keys), and e-mails that develop and embellish on the plot in item containers. This does throw the pacing of the game off a bit for those seeking a pure action title, but it is a nice deviation from the norm of “run and gun”. The good does outweigh the bad in this title though, and it is very stylish. Characters remark about reformatting as we would about death, about the “kernel” as we would about a president, among other things, and the world really seems alive through the characters, computer based dialogue, and locales. From personal computer systems to PDAs to even the Internet, the variety of locations fails to disappoint, and the colorful graphics lend themselves well to the game style. The game is of standard FPS length, taking between fifteen and twenty hours to complete for the majority of gamers, decent, but the ride is over pretty quickly for experienced FPS players, and the subpar multiplayer doesn’t help to increase longevity very much. Mixed in with the action is lightcycles. This plays like a complex version of Snake, with you squaring off against multiple opponents in an attempt to cause them to crash into a wall or your “tail,” and them doing likewise. While this is a fun novelty at first, it can also be very frustrating, as the camera angles are quite bad. In first person mode, it is hard to see what is coming at you from the sides, so you end up blowing up as a quick turn brings you straight into an opponents tail. The chase camera is somewhat of an improvement, but it is overly sensitive, and can be knocked out of position by a quick move of the mouse, and it is difficult to recalibrate in position. Lightcycles are made more interesting by powerups and turbo boosts, and when the camera isn’t distracting you, lightcycles can be a good distraction from the run and gun shooting. The enemies are relatively good, and quite aggressive, but again, if you find lightcycles difficult, expect to die multiple times before completing each course, which can lead to a lot of frustration. One of the most unique parts of the games is also the most noticeable, the graphical style. This is one game where realism was as far away from the developers minds as possible. Tron 2.0 runs on the Lithtech engine, the same as other titles such as No One Lives Forever 2, and the game is very detailed. The world is very lively and colorful, and with a powerful enough DirectX 8.1 compliant (Geforce 3 or higher) graphics card, a glow effect shines from many light sources. The character animation in the game is overall pretty smooth as well, with characters tossing discs, firing weapons, and the like, without looking stiff. The graphics go a long way towards maintaining the far fetched illusion that the game takes place inside a computer. The corruption in the game has an eerie green glow to it, and the landscape in corrupted areas is very distorted, compared to the exacting symmetry in uncorrupted “partitions.” One of the most graphically beautiful areas in the game is the Internet, looking like a cyber version of Las Vegas, with tons of neon lighting and signs hung throughout the area, just as a “living” version of the Internet should appear. Overall, while the graphics are not as good as those of the latest Unreal powered games, the engine lends itself to the computer locales very well, and the graphics really help to immerse you into the gameplay. The sound in this game is of decent quality. The music score is overrall well done, with more darker sounds accompanying levels of corruption, and faster songs during actoin sequences. The voice acting is above average, though some of the character’s voices have a generic feel to them. The sound effects are quite good though, and the sounds of discs bouncing off walls, enemies “derezzing,” the pulse fire of the laser rifles, they all really fit well into the game. Overall, the sound effects are pretty decent, but could have been better. The only real qualm I have with this game is the anemic multiplayer modes. There are two gameplay modes, lightcycles and Disc Arena. Lightcycles is just the same as in single player, but with human racers instead of the AI. If you enjoyed single player lightcycles, you will enjoy multiplayer as well, but it really is personal preference. Disc Arena is the more unique mode, and really is love-hate. You begin in a lobby, which is a central location walled off by clear plastic so you can watch ongoing matches. The problem with this is you are given weapons in that area, so those wanting to watch the matches are frequently killed in a pointless frenzy (lobby kills don’t count towards your score.) When you get onto the game field, the maps are very claustrophobic, with your only weapon being a disk. You play for three rounds, and you must win three before your opponent to be victorious. You and your opponent(s) are seperated by an inpassable ravine, so you must throw your disks at each other to win. This can be fun occasionally, but after a few rounds it does get old fast, as most of the maps require the same strategy of hiding behind something, throwing your disc or blocking one that is incoming, and hiding again. The game could have benefited from larger maps with the inclusion of some of the other weapons from the single player game, but in its current state, it deserves a look and a few hours to try it out, but it is definitely not goint to widely appeal to the gaming community. Tron 2.0 had real potential to remaster the cult classic movie it was based on, and only partially succeeded. Anyone looking for a fun and unique single player game should definitely check out Tron 2.0, but the multiplayer, and some of the single player aspects are disappointing. On the whole it is a worthy single player game for those willing to put up with some frustrations, and it overrall was an enjoyable, decent shooter.
This will be a pretty short review. The main review really sums up a lot of how I also felt. Visually, the game is fantastic - from the glow effect to some extremely large and varied levels, the visual presentation i... Read Full Review
Say what you will about the groundbreaking CG effects used to approximate a virtual world in Tron, but that movie bored the heck out of me. Due to what I suppose were enormous budgetary and technical constraints, most o... Read Full Review
