Tribes: Ascend review
Wonderful, breath-clutching games of chicken happen along the z-axis in Tribes: Ascend. You’re hovering, the guy you want to kill is hovering, and you each have a few sips of battery juice left in your jetpack. Gravity is death: drop first, and you become an instant candidate for one of Tribes’ splash-damage weapons: a grenade, Spinfusor disc, or gamma-ray-green mortar shell.
In these shared seconds of airtime, your brain crunches weapon trajectory paths, shot velocity, topography and damage radii—and there’s a layer of deception happening atop that. Maybe I’ll feint a fall, then right-click to lift at the last second. Maybe he’ll whip out his secondary weapon to harass me out of the air with pistol shots. Maybe I’ll put a grenade under him to force him to spend all his flight energy.
Tribes Ascend preview
Hello? Oh, hello The Past. How are you? What’s that, all of your games would like to come back, with reboots or sequels, only free? Alrighty then.
The Tribes series has had a ridiculously checkered history, but its best incarnation – as a fast, team-based multiplayer shooter – all but ended with Tribes 2 and the dissolution of its creators, Dynamix. So to play Tribes: Ascend is to take a wild ride back in time to 2001, shortly after Tribes 2 was released, to relive the game’s skiing, jetpacks, spinfusors, flags and huge battlefields. Only better, and with a free-to-play payment model.
F2P strategy game Void Rim announced by former PoxNora devs
Desert Owl Games, a newly formed indie developer based in Arizona, has officially announced its first project: a free-to-play turn-based strategy game called Void Rim. The game is being designed by the original creators of card-based strategy game PoxNora, which became a Sony Online Entertainment property after the publisher acquired the indie studio behind it in 2009. That studio was closed by SOE during layoffs almost exactly one year ago.
Auto Club Revolution open beta is go, race for free
There aren’t a great many free to play racers out there. If Need For Speed World’s reliance on single-use power-ups puts you off, and Trackmania’s spiralling tracks feel a little too mad, you might want to try Auto Club Revolution. It’s just entered open beta, which means you can sign up for an account, download the tracks and start racing for free.
As you race you can unlock new cars and tuning options, and there’s a fairly decent car customisation suite that will let you decorate your ride with decals and new paint schemes. It’s made by Eutechnyx. who developed last year’s official Nascar game and, before that, Ferrari challenge, so don’t expect any giant blue shells or homing rockets in this one. You can sign up and start playing on the Auto Club Revolution site.
Age of Empires Online invades Steam
Free-to-play, massively multiplayer RTS Age of Empires Online has arrived on Steam. AoE lets you fight RTS battles with colourful Celt, Egyptian, Persian and Greek forces. Victories will let you expand your capital city, unlocking bonuses for your troops and unlocking new units to be recruited in future fights. All that is explained in more detail and in a deeper voice in the new overview trailer above.
In Age of Empires Online, you pay to unlock new factions and game modes, rather than putting money into small XP boosts. All of the civilisation packs are half price on Steam now, and you can buy all of them, and the skirmish mode, for £19.50. Alternatively, jump in and check out AoE’s cheerful, sunny cities. It’s free, after all. Find out more in our Age of Empires Online review.
Ghost Recon Online beta key giveaway
The dictionary lists reconnaissance as a “a search made for useful military information in the field, especially by examining the ground,” a common pastime of ghosts, possibly, but not an advisable tactic in Ubisoft’s fierce free to play shooter, Ghost Recon Online. Staring at the floor will only get you dead.
GRO is a free to play, tactical, class-based team shooter with lots of levelling and some mad gadgets. You have to take points to earn XP and push back the enemy team, employing futuristic dome shields and microwave beams to draw enemies out of cover so you can snipe them in the head. Get a feel for the three classes in the recent Ghost Recon Online trailer and have a read of our Ghost Recon Online preview for a sense of what it’s like to play.
If you’d like to try it before it’s out, CVG have thousands of beta keys to give away. Head thataway for details on how to sign up for your chance to grab a slot. Good luck!
Tribes: Ascend patch adds new capture the flag map, more servers and balance fixes
The latest patch for the Tribes: Ascend open beta adds a new capture the flag stage called Sunstar, set in an arid desert full of undulating dunes, perfect for a bit of sand surfing. The grim, volcanic Temple Ruins map has also been rearranged after feedback from fans and new European and Asian servers have been powered up to reduce server load and lag.
Tribes: Ascend will be officially out on April 12, but anyone can play the open beta right now. You can sign up and grab the client from the Tribes: Ascend site. Read on for new screenshots of Sunstar and the reworked Temple Ruins and the patch notes in full, which include bad news for Pathfinders who like to use Nitron grenades, and good news for Heavies who are sick of moving so damn slow all the time.
Command a menacing metal beast with our World of Tanks giveaway
World of Tanks favors leaders—the kind that can assess a battlefield in the blink of an eye, then relay orders to their teammates that’ll secure a decisive victory. But what if you’re a born leader who refuses to spend money for better equipment? That’s where we come in.
MechWarrior Online preview
Mechs are complex creatures. Their intricacy facilitates this sweet see-sawing between being an engineer and being a pilot—something that really only happens elsewhere in high-fidelity racing games. Fail in the cockpit, and you can retreat to the garage to scrub everything off the drawing board and restart from scratch.
The worry with MechWarrior Online was that this nuance would evaporate because of its business model, or from being in the hands of a developer whose closest experience to making MechWarrior was contributing to a poorly-received Transformers game.
Nope. After seeing the game at GDC, I’m reassured that the minutiae we associate with mechs might finally be paired with the modern technology it deserves.
Tribes: Ascend release date set for April 12
Tribes: Ascend will be well and truly, properly out on April 12. The free to play game that calls itself “world’s fastest shooter” has been in open beta for a short while, and has been regularly updated with new maps, game modes and extra gadgets for its high speed-classes. The splendid Dead Island parody trailer above show what happens when one of those classes snatches the flag when he’s not going fast enough, an act known among Tribes players as the Llama grab.
“This video demonstrates the perils of trying to caputre a flag while going too slow,” explains Hi-Rez chief technical officer, Todd Harris. “The outcome is predictable but no less tragic.”
Tribes: Ascend feels very polished for a game that’s still not officially out. You can try it for yourself by downloading the client from the Tribes: Ascend site, and signing up for an account. It’s free!
Warface trailer showcases classes and massive mech suits
A free to play team shooter built in CryEngine 3 is actually a pretty exciting prospect, even before you factor in the giant mechs. If Warface is fast and accessible enough it could beat Call of Duty a its own game, providing a prettier experience for no money. Perhaps. It’s still too early to tell, but it looks like have a chance to get our hands on an early build soon. Crytek are hunting alpha testers right now. You can sign up for a chance to participate on the Warface site.
Firefall trailer shows world building and sweet vistas
Some games reward nosy players for their exploration with a pot of gold or a new sword, but a great view or an interesting place is so much more rewarding. That sensation of climbing up a gruelling mountain, coming over a ridge and seeing a gorgeous vista unfold before you is one of the things that games like Skyrim do so well. It looks as though Firefall is trying a similar trick. Mushroom rock is the perfect example of how to put a good view to good use.
Firefall will be free to play when it’s out, but the only way to strap on a jetpack right now is to sign up for a spot on the Firefall beta. For more on Firefall, check out Mark Kern’s impressive hologram powers in the last Firefall trailer, in which he also talks about Red 5′s plans for rolling out Firefall.
Tribes: Ascend open beta update adds new map, badges and sonic punches
Tribes: Ascend is in open beta. You can sign up, download it and play it right now. It’s already good fun, but it’s still a work in progress. There are plenty more maps and perks to be added before Hi-Rez consider the game complete. The latest patch has made a few of those additions already, adding a new team deathmatch map called “Outskirts” and two new perks.
The first is Rage. Getting angry will boost your energy regeneration and offer you a 25% heal if you’re standing next to your flag when an enemy snatches it, a good perk for defenders who have just been blown off the flag by a Pathfinder’s spinfusor disk. The second one is a little more exotic. The Sonic Punch will send out a shockwave when you melee. This can push back enemy players and, importantly, dislodge a flag from an opponent’s grasp. It’ll be interesting to see how top Tribes players make use of this one.
