Aside from the mediocre first-person shooter elements, Monolith captures the spirit and sparkle of “Tron”...
* Gameplay: Choosing to set the story in current times allowed for several modern developments in computing to weave through the plot. The title alone has a double meaning, since the development for the game no doubt began twenty years after the movie came out. Virus’s, spam, the PDA, the Internet…all nice additions that put a fresh spin on an old story. Your character is zapped into the computer world in the opening scene, and that’s where the whole game takes place. Much of the design from Monolith’s “No One Lives Forever” shooter is evident, such as the story notes you read along the way, the overheard conversations, the way bystanders run and cower in fear when a weapon is fired, to the item selection phase that begins many missions. Unlike the previous game, you can switch the items you start with at any time, a feature lacking in NOLF. Although the utility and defense options work well, the weapons are where the game falls flat. It’s almost as if the designers were saying, “No really, all they will need is the disc!” The others you pick up along the way are poor versions of standard weapons found in countless shooters. A combination of factors weaken their effectiveness, one being that the enemies you encounter all have eagle eyesight, spotting you and firing from far away. Couple this with the high amount of energy required to discharge a weapon, and you end up just using the disc anyway. Seriously, you can play the whole game with just the disc and a whole lotta circle-strafing and do better than using any other weapon. This is a real shame since all of the weapons are fantastic to look at and use. The main problem with the disc is that it often gets “stuck”…somewhere…out there, and not returning when you need it most. I was highly impressed by the level design, with a nice mix of action, puzzle-solving, exploration and racing. Ah, the racing. I knew those light cycles were going to be a problem the minute I heard they were going to be a feature. I just pictured how the designers were going to make it possible for players to make ninety degree split-hair turns at 186,282.397 miles a second. A faster, free-roaming camera would have helped. However, the light cycle missions become so frustrating that you just want to finish them, rather than a sport you can master with skill. For one thing, the computer opponents make turns impossible for a human player to make. That may fit in with how things work in the Tron universe, but it makes for lousy gameplay. There are a few too many jumping puzzles, the annoying kind where you have to hop on tiny block after tiny block, and one misstep means “end of line”. I enjoyed the many touches that deepened the whole experience of being inside a computer, such as accessing memory blocks to gain permissions, upgrades and stored e-mails. The level that puts you in a PDA was hilarious, and the dance club (the Progress Bar, har har) had a lot of style.
* Graphics: From the moment I stepped inside the world of Tron, I was dazzled. Everything about the game looks right. All that neon-fringed geometry and rotoscoped character design brought a smile to my face. This is reason alone to play the game, if you are a fan of the film. Forget stealth and weapon accuracy, just take a walk and absorb the beautiful skies flowing with data streams, at glossy platforms and light bridges. Corrupted sections are cracked and uprooted like an earthquake hit the area, and bottomless canyons begged me to peer over every edge. The characters you meet all look alike, which was kind of disappointing. Funny enough, even though there was no limitation to filming real actors in black and white, the designers chose to be true to the film and leave their faces grayscale anyway, a nice touch. As you might expect, the special effects match the glitz seen everywhere else. Enemies derez into little blocks and a flash of light. Your disc leaves a light trail as it sails around the area. Weapons have some imaginative animations as they assemble on the spot. Dying is as undramatic as dragging a file to the delete bin. The light cycle arenas have a style all their own, but after a dozen restarts, I was screaming to just finish them. The new cycle contributed by Syd Mead has a great design, true to his original creations, with a shape reminiscent of chopper designs I’ve seen.
* Audio: This is one area that may puzzle people who just don’t get Tron. Upon first being introduced to the synthetic compositions of Wendy Carlos, a newcomer might think something was either wrong with their speakers, or they just stepped into the Wayback machine and arrived in 1982. It’s more than irony at work here, with a story about a digital universe featuring an electronic score. The music is epic without taking center stage, allowing the visuals to draw forth. This is what truly completes the sensory fulfillment and puts you in the game. No other game I’ve played has such a perfect marriage between the music and the environment. Having the voice work of Tron alumni Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan really tightened up the experience. The effects for every action in the game consist of electronic beeps, pops, whirs and blips, along with the ambient humming and pulsing you might imagine inside a fantasy computer world.
* Value: The single player game is a tad short, even taking exploration and gawking at the scenery into account. The online multiplayer as of this writing is barely alive, although the modding community evidently still sees contributions. If you are only a fan of first-person shooters, I’d have to suggest passing on this title. But if you were a kid in 1982, wore a space invaders t-shirt and had shoes with Velcro straps, welcome home.
* Tilt: C’mon, it’s TRON! Afraid to play a game your dad knows more about than you do? You don’t like neon lighting and straight edges? Realism is a fad, I’m telling you. Give me the simple life of polygons, perpendicularity and plane geometry any day. Oh, God I’m old.