Playing Tribes 2 after the Tribes 1 is like playing CoD for years and then deciding to play Jurassic Park for the SNES.
Tribes 2 might be a perfectly fun and entertaining game for those who weren't devout followers of the original, but if you were...
Welcome to Starsiege Tribes Version 1.17 ... That's right, it's not even freakin' close 1.25 much less an entirely different version of itself.
I've been playing Starsiege Tribes since 1998, and heck, I still play it today (even have it in the lobby as I'm writing). But this poor excuse of a sequel finally plagued my mind after all these years when I stumbled upon it while looking for the CD case of the Diablo II expansion: the Lord of the Destruction. To be honest, I don't know why none of the people I've talked to haven't written a review on this game, maybe they just want to forget about it, as the past reviews seem to have been lost and those of us who get painful reminders of it look on the boards to get a few laughs, but are shocked by the scores they see; though, this intrigued me, and I set about going to their website that was on the back of the game case (though, surprise surprise, they don't even have mention that Tribes 2 has ever existed, or at least not an obvious trail which leads to it on the offical site).
Deciding to give it another chance I installed it on my computer and played it for several hours, both on the poor excuse of a single player training missions (I say thing as back then it was advertised as having a single player campaign, even though people will say "OMG, it's just for training noob!"). The controls were inferior to the first, the weapons graphics were horrendous to the point I wanted to poke, and the terrain was, what a surprise, much less graphical than even the first tribes. It was barren, with no attempts to even give the terrain any diversity such as the lobs of painted grass the first had upon the soil.
Sure, it had a few trees here and there, badly animated water (though, I suppose I won't fault it considering it's age), and the actual characters looked like large stick figures rather than human beings as they did in the first game.
This is all with everything on max settings, 16x Ano, Max Resolution, "bloom", and whole nine yards. Playing the demo of Time Shift on all max settings may have made me slightly more biased, but I recall these emotions of me being ripped off by sequel of a great game in the past as well.
This has got the be the absolute worst sequel in the history of any great game; Starsiege tribes offered very little new that wasn't present or vastly irrelevent that the first did not offer in spades. In addition, with the original Starsiege Tribes, of which I gave a 9.5, you are now able to download it free and play it with a hundred times more people as you will with the crappier version of Tribes 2; gee, I wonder why it has so much more people?
The fact that it's free may be a reason that it's around a hundred times more, but even before it was downloadable it still had a vast amount of more players due to the fact that it was simply much better in every way. The Disc thrower looks like a dog swallowed and spitted it up, the blaster animations look like huge orange basketballs that merely deflect off of the poorly animated surfaces up close, the starting controls are inferior until meddled with, and the actual look of the armors looks like it was made by a student just learning how to duplicate something that was perfectly fine to begin with.
Now, StarSiege Tribes: Vengeance is a game that is worthy of being a Tribes Successor in my opinion, and is a thousand times better than this pile of crap that was just a huge waste of money when I bought it the first day that it came out. I honestly tried to like this game, but always ended up going back to the original Starsiege Tribes like many of the people I've spoken with about this game; though, our opinions aren't necessarily the same of other people, and if you enjoyed this game then more power to you an all that.
Though, if you've downloaded the original tribes and see this for sale somewhere, just pass it up and go for Vengeance if you must get another Tribes game, it's how Tribes 2 should have been in my opinion.