Sierra and Dynamix's Starsiege Tribes holds the distinction of being the first 3D shooter to make the move to online-only. Adding wide-open spaces, limited pilotable vehicles, 32 simultaneous players even over a slow connection, jump jets that added up and down to your requisite 360 degrees of shooting mayhem, and a plethora of new game types to a market that wasn't entirely sure it would even support a shooter without single-play. That last question seems silly now in this age of Quake III, Unreal Tournament and incredibly popular mods like Counterstrike for Half-Life but Tribes really was a trail blazer. Well, maybe it didn't forge the trail, but it did get there first. Tribes 2 jump jets onto the scene a full year after the most recent commercially developed multiplay shooter promising to advance the genre even further. It mostly fulfills that promise, but sadly, it just isn't finished, optimized or ready for prime time.
As promised Tribes 2 (they dropped they Starsiege name) gives us new weapons, environments, vehicles and game types. The single player mode is beefed up with the now commonplace bot-match and there's a horde of new maps. Speaking of hordes, they've added a new "tribe" to the human vs. human conflict of before. Called the BioDerms they are a beefy, ugly, and monstrous player character type with their own benefits. As before, Tribes 2 has three basic classes, each demanding a slightly different playing style. It's not like Team Fortress Classic by any means, instead light armor equals speed and maneuverability, heavy armor means increased damage resistance but slowness and severe limitations of how far you can fly with your jump jets, and medium armor is the mid-point between the two trade-offs.