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…Mokona suddenly found himself drop out of thin air and onto a patch of grass. A light breeze gently blew against his face as he looked around to get his bearings. Light rain fell from the sky as he observed men, women, and cybrids moving about in a panic – there seemed to be something going on. “Defend our base!” a terse voice barked into the radio. “Yes” responded a feminine voice. It looked like whatever this place was; it was going to be under attack. “I will defend our flag!” a confident voice assured the figures that seemed to be running around haphazardly along the building’s battlements and around Mokona. From the radio chatter it seemed that a pilot had encountered an incoming enemy bomber that was slowly making its way towards the base along with some ground support. Upon hearing the pilot’s report, Mokona went inside the building looking for a way to prepare himself for the impending attack. Running towards a resupply station he produced a laser rifle and an energy pack and made his way upstairs to the battlements on the roof, standing beside a heavily armoured soldier. There in the rain, he patiently awaited the enemy’s attack as he adjusted the scope on his rifle. Detecting some movement along the crest of the hill in front of the base, Mokona took aim and popped the head of a soldier who stuck his head a little to far over the top. Grinning to himself, he waited for the charge in his rifle to build up again. Meanwhile, the soldier with the heavy armour opened fire with his chaingun and pumped the hill full of lead catching another soldier off guard and ripping him into shreds. Suddenly noticing a dark silhouette in the sky, Mokona quickly took out his targeting laser and pointed it towards what appeared to be an incoming bomber. The heavy trooper beside him took this as his cue to fire off a missile and they both watched as it detonated against the offending aircraft with a resounding boom. However, the bomber continued on its course and began what could only be a kamikaze dive that was accompanied by the shrill whistle of incoming bombs… Using his jetpack to move out of the way to avoid major injury, Mokona watched as the bomber crashed into the base killing its occupants, its deadly payload cutting a large swath of destruction into the base. Unfortunately for Mokona he did not move out of the way quickly enough to avoid an incoming sniper blast that hit him squarely in the chest. As he felt himself plummeting back towards the ground and his life draining away he noticed an enemy soldier making off with the base’s flag at the edge of his fading vision. “Whoohoo!” the enemy soldiers whooped. “Shazbot…” Mokona muttered as he hit the wet ground with a dull thud.

In a nutshell, that basically describes a typical multiplayer experience in Tribes 2, Dynamix’s latest FPS game. Building upon the success of its predecessor, the original Tribes, T2 continues to provide a fast-paced, team oriented FPS experience based in the Starsiege universe. Combine this with a multitude of weapons and options for the gamer to play around with, Dynamix has virtually guaranteed that another batch of T2 players will be in for another round of sleepless nights.

T2 is based in the Starsiege universe that brought us neat things like Cybrids, HERCs, and Bioderms. Fortunately however, knowledge of the Starsiege universe isn’t really a requirement for enjoying the game. But for those who really want to know, according to the manual (more information can be found on the official T2 site) humans in the distant future colonized many worlds but on the frontier zones “neo-barbarian” Tribes wage war against each other to fight for the possession of new worlds. To make matters worse, the genetically engineered BioDerm Hordes have decided to crash the party. Right. The fact that “neo-barbarians” would have access to military bases stocked to the gills in advanced weaponry and vehicles (not to mention interplanetary and interstellar travel as well) will strike one as rather odd but thankfully the admittedly flimsy background can be ignored altogether without hampering what is really important in a game like this: gameplay.