TRON 2.0 
The very difficult part of every review is its start. Trying to avoid cliché phrases and be original authors often suffer finding these right lines that are meant to spark reader's interest and gently introduce him to the main part. Oh well, I have been never good in this aspect of my rather lengthy mumbles, so I will save my time and effort for the 'meaty' part. Originally this was not supposed to be a detailed, in-depth story about my meeting with Jet and his world, but chilling under warm Caribbean sun I thought that I might as well spend my after-lunch time with a laptop instead of taking a well deserved(they like to say it) and so commonly seen on this cruise ship afternoon nap. Before I knew what was going on and more importantly, before my first battery run out of its life, I had most of my impressions compiled. It did look like a mess though, and as embarrassing as this will sound, I have never found the required strength in my character to fix it up any. Despite this little unfortunate detail, I am more than happy to share these lines with you, since that is all they were initially written for anyway. These impressions are late by the time you read this, but my boss did not feel generous enough to provide me with a wireless Internet connection so I could post the reading at Rage3D in a timely manner. You are free to blame him of course, as far as you make sure he never finds out who your source was.
All right, we are talking about TRON 2.0, highly anticipated PC game from Monolith. It is the one that I picked up a few weeks earlier and the one that surprised me with its flashy '$49.99' price tag. Well, actually, it cost me $74.99 CAD, but I thought I should convert my hard earned (or not) cash thrown at the counter into easier to understand USD currency. You might think I am whining, and you might be partially right, but I was more surprised than disappointed seeing a PC game retailing half a hundred. We usually do not get to see such 'pleasing' picture. As games come out, one could safely walk into the store with $40 to pick up the latest 'mega-hit'. In fact, the last game I had to shell out $50 for was Unreal 2 last February. Anyways, I had the box in my hands and I had clear intentions to find out what was behind it.
One more thing worth mentioning before you will keep on reading. TRON 2.0 as a game associates in my mind with, well, with TRON 2.0 as game, which became available for PC platform about a month ago. No movie, yes, you heard it correctly, I have never watched TRON or was interested enough to read about it. So, take it as a given, you are not dealing with a TRON nut here, someone who was watching the movie for 45th time while installing the game. I will tell you about TRON 2.0 based on my impressions with it as a PC game, and nothing else. It is up to you to decide whether this is good or bad. If by the end you will have a desire to reach for a rotten tomato or two, please let me know in advance, so I could flee in fear.
I usually never read manuals of games I buy (and I should; recent Republic taught me this unpleasant lesson). This time around, oddly enough, I flipped through a few pages of the tiny printout. I did not find anything interesting though. A standard set of controls, an attempt to introduce you to some story, blah, blah, blah... Overall, the manual did not contain anything worthy in my opinion.
Have to mention that I did not jump into world of TRON unprepared. I did play the 'does-it-ever-get-any-shorter' single player demo, which I found to be promising enough to justify purchase of full version. I have to give props to developers here; one short level was a satisfying experience and left me wanting more. I surely got more of it. Did I get more of the better however?
TRON 2.0 is a first person shooter. Ugh, sounds very 'interesting' so far, does not it? Here comes the difference. Surprisingly you do not need to wander across chemical plants, South American jungles or streets of criminal L.A. anymore. No terrorist hunts, hostage rescues or thirsty for blood mobs are around this time. In TRON 2.0, you play as Jet Bradley, son of ENCOM programmer Alan Bradley. The latter managed to create the technology needed to digitize humans and send them into the digital world, and as Jet, you are of course to test it out first. So, you are 'digitized' or, if said simpler, put inside of a PC. No, please do not ask me about configuration of this computer, because I will not be able to answer. Knowing Monolith and typical quality of their products, I would assume a Pentium 4 or a high-end AMD CPU at least. What I do know however, is that even a Joe consumer should be ashamed to keep his only rig in such a horrible condition. 'Holy cow!' is the expression I am looking for. Viruses, scanners, IPCs (Intrusion Countermeasure Programs), different utilities and applications are wrecking chaos in deep clusters of poor hard drive. I would highly recommend getting a hold of Win98 SE start up floppy disk and typing in 'format this freaking C: twice!' command without further hesitation, but it is evident that creators of TRON 2.0 did not want to make it so easy for a reason. Perhaps they were looking to give you some value for money spent, and I am not the one to blame them.
I will not tell you what happens to Jet after he's turned into a bunch of bits, bytes and donuts on a hard drive, and that is not only because I do not want to spoil the story for you, but also because I do not remember the storyline in great detail anymore. Perhaps that gives you a hint on its possible quality. Or unneeded complexity. Or both. Anyhow, if after reading my impressions below you still feel dedicated enough to try TRON 2.0 out, you will of course do much better by experiencing everything yourself.
TRON 2.0 is a rather lengthy game. It took me a few weeks of on/off playtime to finish. Avid gamers will probably say that I am a weakling and there is nothing else offered by TRON 2.0 than barely 15-20 hours of game playtime. Most likely they are right, but I like to enjoy my games slowly, exploring levels bit-by-bit (or byte by byte?) and trying to collect, destroy and defeat anything that shows in my sight. As such, my time with TRON 2.0 was a very good one. The game starts slow, it did for me. After all, TRON's control mechanisms are not all this complex to cover up for a few boring hours/levels in the beginning. TRON is a standard, WASD first person shooter, with responsible controls, decent and accessible HUD. As usually seen in PC games, controls could be completely re-mapped to suit your tastes better. Coming back to HUD interface by the way... At the beginning, I had no idea of what some symbols shown on my screen meant, but luckily, this should not affect your experience much. First levels are easy enough to guide you through basic controls and get you familiar with these. Another layer of complexity will open up when you are ready for it later in game. As far as basics go, you got life and energy bars at the bottom right and left respectively, symbol displaying permissions collected so far on a level is in the middle. Upper left part of the screen shows your current Jet engine build and amount of build notes collected on current level. You could see currently active weapon as well as a list of equipped subroutines in the top right corner.
Level design seems bizarre at first, but it grew on me fast enough. I wish it could be more varied, and the same textures would not be repeated over and over in different colors, but first time through the game it does not get to be anything bothersome. I could live with having to go through repeating interiors if game play makes up for it. I do not want to deny that first few hours with the game were very much affected by level design. Until I 'felt' functioning subroutines and programs around me, I was somewhat confused by endless glow effect mixed between flashy red, green and yellow.
For me the key element of every shooter is enemies you encounter on your way to completing the main mission. I am not afraid to say that TRON failed every possibly test in this department. If you are looking for variety amongst your opponents, you might better look somewhere else. I could probably count enemy types using fingers of one hand, and even if there are more than that; all 'bad guys' seem so generic and uninspired that you could hardly tell the difference anyways. There are red, green and purple gnomes (ok, joking; not gnomes, but rather goblins) you are facing. The main difference it weapons they carry. Where red one will throw a disk at you, the green one will blast you with a bomb and purple ones will shoot laser-like beams. While I am making things look simple, this is not far from the truth. Every defeated opponent will leave a core dump, a sphere-like bit of energy or health, You could collect these by pressing action button to fulfil your life and energy bars.
And what do you have to put these wild software to their place? Well, you got a Disk Primitive, a round-shaped object that tends to come back to you no matter how much you want to get rid of it. You have a primary throw attack and a secondary block action (performed by clicking right mouse button by default). Obviously, you could only block when you have disk on hands. Blocking is a little tricky to get into at first. It is all about pre-size timings of your actions and predicting next move of your opponents. Mainly because there could be a little thinking involved, disk duels seem to be a great fun to participate in on first sight. Unfortunately, it is not quite possible to experience the beauty of utilizing simple disk tactics in single player part of TRON 2.0 fully. And not only due to 'relaxed' AI. In the beginning, while you are not fluid with disk actions, it is much easier to duck behind a cover than to try blocking several disks coming at you. Later on, when you feel confident enough to take on several thugs, blocking is not helping anymore, because programs corrupt your subroutines with their blasts, making it more logical for you to dodge shots than to block them. Apart from disk, you will pick up tons of various weapons, gadgets, utilities on your way through the game. Nevertheless, for me most of them were nothing else but color-coded icons in my equipment list. Of course, main appeal of TRON 2.0 was its non-typical environments and disk combat, but I found that the latter was put too much accent on. You used disk and disk only for 95% of the game. My principle in such situation would sound something as traditional as this: "Ain't broken - don't fix!". While some other weapons looked interesting enough to try, there were only few places in the game where you absolutely had to utilize them in order to advance. Such parts would be boss fights (your disk does not deal enough damage to take these 'buddies' on, so something more 'juicy' is preferred) and few levels where you need to snipe your enemies from a great distance. Main disadvantage of using weapons other than your disk is that they drain your precious energy bar. Some more powerful weapons eat it with a great appetite. That is it; that is all, you are stuck (Note: No, not stuck literally, but putting more heart and thoughts into secondary arsenal would be a very welcome thing to do) with universal disk for the most of the game. However, I did use utilities to enhance disk damage as well as some of your character's abilities. Examples of these would be Y-Amp (increases your jump), Virus Scan, Power block and some others. Power Block is a very useful one for example. It deflects any blocked object and returns it as a powerful blast to its owner. Later on in the game, this comes in very handy.
TRON's levels are literally stuffed with archive bins - cubic containers of blue, red and green nodes. If you have required permissions (explanation below) you are free to access these and download needed nodes. Every node will drain a certain amount of energy from your energy bar. Where on early stages spending 10-30 energy units to download a subroutine, permission or an e-mail is a norm, towards the end you will see subroutines that require 150+ energy points in order to be obtained. Typically, the more complex and powerful is a subroutine - the more energy you have to be ready to spend for it.
One of the main components of TRON's game play is a concept of permissions. These are seen as blue nodes in archive bins. Permissions are what gains you access to doors, switches and subroutines, their collection is essential if you want to enhance and level up your character. Each level could contain a maximum of eight permissions (from 1 to 8). Activation of different objects requires certain permission (or a set of permissions). Therefore, for example to download a new subroutine increasing your body protection, you would need to download permissions two and seven first. Therefore for if you are a 'collect 'em all' type of a gamer, you might spend quite some time looking for the missing permission which will give you access to container filled with goodies you'd like to get your hands onto. This encourages exploring and is a welcome addition in my eyes.
Many subroutines are spread throughout the game as red nodes in archive bins. These could belong to one of three types: Combat, Defence and Utility. I already partially covered Utilities, which enhance your abilities in different ways. Combat subroutines are essentially new weapons your character could use and defence includes mainly body protection. Each and every subroutine you find is in one of three possible states: alpha, beta or gold. Where alphas are usually primitive and least powerful, betas have greater effect on you or your enemies. Gold subroutines are what you ultimately want to carry - most powerful out of the three. On top of that, gold subroutines take minimum of space (one cell) in your inventory storage. Considering you have a limited room to fit currently active subroutines in, carrying gold ones will save you much more space than 'heavy', three-cell large alphas. Logically enough, as soon as you have found a gold subroutine, lesser version of it aren't needed anymore. You could upgrade any chosen subroutine to the next level by one-time use of 'upgrade programs' (cannot recall the correct name at the moment; perhaps a little too many coronas) seen on some levels. These are not met often enough to be relied on however, so you should make sure you search every archive bin for a better chance to upgrade your goodies. You could refill your energy (as well as health) by accessing patch routines. Unlike health patch routines, which will only refill certain amount of health, there are some infinite energy patch routines providing you with as much energy as needed.
Through your inventory interface screen you also have access to three main procedurals: Port, Disinfect and Defrag. One helps you identify unknown subroutines collected, the other repairs functions corrupted in combat and the last one will successfully defrag those blocks of your inventory storage that might occasionally go bad. One more thing worthy of a mention is that is a subroutine becomes corrupted and no repair actions are taken shortly, there is a great chance of corruption spreading onto healthy block of your storage and damaging other subroutines. As a little remark, I could add that apart from blue permissions and red subroutines archive bins also contain green e-mails. Purpose of an e-mail is usually to give you more background information on your journey. I pretty much skipped most of them by the way.
There are also build notes you will collect. These (as well as just receiving engine points for successful completion of certain levels/parts) upgrade your engine. There is an exact hundred of them you could possibly find, usually 3-5 per level. Every time your engine number grows by a full point (example: from 1.0.0 to 2.0.0) you are able to increase performance ratings of Jet. Ratings are split into the following categories: Health, Energy, Weapon Efficiency, Transfer Rate and Processor. I will start with the most obvious ones. Upgrading Health expands your life bar beyond starting 100 points, Energy upgrades work the same way. Weapon Efficiency reduces amount of energy your advanced weapons use, and as someone who barely used anything other than primitive disk, I did not find a good reason to upgrade it. Transfer Rate improves speed at which downloads of subroutines and permissions take place. Lastly, Processor upgrades reduce time required to perform a Port, Disinfect or Defrag procedural.
Puzzles are widely present in TRON, but most of them are jumping ones. Jumping and first person perspective do not live happily together in my head. As the result, I disliked these parts a lot, and if not save anywhere feature, I would have probably never finished TRON 2.0 frustrated by another 'bunny' challenge. Thankfully enough I got through rather easily, permanently damaging only five keyboards in the process. To say it in short - TRON 2.0 is a hidden treasure for any fan of games with the well known plumber.
After every dozen levels or so you get to participate in light cycle events (there is even a special light cycle mode available from the main menu of TRON). These are battles against three-four opponents on several arenas. Your cycle could only make 90-degree turns on the grid and it could never stop completely. If you press and hold 'down' button you will slow down the cycle as much as possible, and accelerating is done by pressing and holding 'up' key. There are power-ups placed on the grid, which, if collected, will give you advantages over opponents. Every cycle leaves a long receding trail. The goal is to destroy your competitors and remain the only cycle on the grid. If you hit your own trail, trails left by others or walls you lose and are forced to restart the level. Light cycle battles are tied to the main plot of the game very loosely and they often feel almost like separate bonus levels, except from the fact that they are not any rewarding in reality and could be even frustrating sometimes. I heard that the latest patch makes it possible to skip light cycles completely, but playing retail 1.0 version of TRON I never had a chance to verify this as a true statement. While they bring some sort of variety onto the table at first, they become repetitive and boring rather quickly.
Looking at what was said so far, I notice that it looks a lot like an explanation of TRON's key game play elements mixed with my personal points of view on them. I let it be this way on purpose. Firstly, if you have no idea what a subroutine is in first place, I am afraid my review would look like a bunch of pointless sentences with lots of 'techy' words thrown around. Secondly, I think that it is very difficult to review TRON, because of its uniqueness and many never seen before elements. I did not want to mess these up, so I thought I would compile a step-by-step guideline to help me analyze my impressions further. Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands.
TRON 2.0 makes a very solid entry in graphical department. Everything looks great, and if you are not bothered by somewhat overused glow element (does not make it less innovative though), repeated textures and overly bright colors then odds are you will like what you see. The game runs ultra-smooth on its Jupiter engine and I never noticed even minor slowdowns. I tried increasing resolution to 1600x1200(from 1280x960 I usually use) expecting to see the game bringing my 9700 Pro to its knees, but that never happened. I was still doing well over 60fps even in most intense combat sequences, and that with 4xAA applied. Nothing much to add to said above, mainly because TRON is a game you really have to see by yourself to appreciate its extraordinary look and feel. Everything beautifully pulsates and glows around you, blocky geometric shapes give environments a fresh look. Until you find yourself bored with same generic levels repeatedly, you will look at yet another neon glow effect in awe. Cut-scenes are using in-game engine to and look respectable. Facial appearance animations are a little weak, but considering that you are dealing with heart-less programs most of the time, they are acceptable. Jumping a little bit ahead of things, I want to say that visuals are unfortunately TRON's strongest selling point. Consider the sentence above true only if your eyes could withstand never-ending glow effect.
Music never got to the point where it became annoying, but on the other hand, it is not anything worth mentioning. Some generic tunes, something that you never notice while playing. Somewhere I read that TRON 2.0 has Wendy Carlos' original movie score as its main musical theme. Honestly, from what I heard I would never even imagine such. Voice acting however surely played on my nerves. Without a doubt, I found voice of main character Jet to be the worst I have recently heard. My ears were begging to turn the volume down during lengthy cut-scenes, because Jet's voice reminded me of an overly exited kid staring at some exotic animal in a zoo. Way too childish and cheesy if you ask me. The rest of voiceovers are very average with slightly better acting heard in some parts. Dialogue is weak all by itself, and coupled with flat humour and bad voice acting it produces quite a negative result. As far as sounds go, I could say that footsteps, sounds of derezzing (sound of a destroyed program falling apart into byte dust), light cycle engines all sound good in full EAX 3.0 glory.
TRON 2.0 came out after an extensive period of summer drought on PC scene. Maybe that is why I was looking forward to it so much, playing mediocre (for the most part) summer games. I expected TRON 2.0 to put an end to my sufferings and open gates to great autumn for PC gamers. Now, after completing the game, I realize that it did not live up to my expectations. Yes, it certainly did keep me busy for over two weeks and it was entertaining enough experience for me to beat the game. But while I appreciated overall polish, I never got sucked into the game much. Storyline, a bit on a cheesy side, certainly did not help it. Even now, writing these lines I could say that I felt obligated, owed it to myself, to do so. Too much of a unique game TRON is just to burry it under piles of other FPS titles. Something that a fan of action games absolutely could not skip in first place, and maybe something that I now wish I had skipped. While the game does some parts remarkably well, it falls short in others. The storyline is severely lacking, and action is not as adrenaline pumping as I would like it to be. Filled with generic enemies, generic levels and generic weapons, TRON often feels like a standard shooter with dull combat.
Those who like to look at numbers shall not be disappointed. After fiddling with decimals and calculating floating-point integers (certainly, my one-sided ATI's 24-bit precision level played its role here), I think that TRON 2.0 deserves a 7.5 on a scale of ten. It is a good game with visuals balancing around nine and sound that could be given a solid seven overall. What ultimately drags down the average is uninspired game play filled with often pointless and frustrating jumping puzzles, bland light cycle levels and 'rinse & repeat' combat mechanics. I will bump the game play score to a 6.5 given lengthy single player part. I also suspect that the numbers could go up after evaluating multiplayer options offered, but I am a lonely freak with single player gaming set as main preference. For this reason, I will not dig into multiplayer at all. It is, by all means, out of score of this review, and I never meant to convince you otherwise.
Wait, but what about enjoyment factor? Was it present in TRON or are the lines above a wasted space not telling you what really matters? Do not worry. Yes, it was there, some fun is to be had with TRON 2.0. However, if an ultimate and true question arises, asking if TRON 2.0 is worth forty or more bucks of yours, I will suggest you waiting a little and perhaps hunting for a special deal on the game. And buy Chaser in the meanwhile. :)
C:\>exit
Posted by P1x44r on 27/07/2005 14:03 
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