Tribes 3: Rivals Hands-On – Can This Old-School FPS Reinvent Itself?

There’s something about over-the-top, old-school shooters that you just won’t find in AAA FPSs today, and that’s perhaps best exemplified by the likes of the Tribes series. Sure, they might not achieve the same visual perfection, but when you’re skiing across maps and using a jetpack to capture a rival team’s flag while performing midair drive-bys on anyone who tries to stop you, who really cares how slick the textures look? Hi-Rez Studios’ upcoming Tribes 3: Rivals aims to revive the whimsical and hilarious bloodsport that soaked up countless hours in my youth, but with a tighter focus owing to matches with significantly fewer players. After a couple nights going hands-on with an alpha build, playing a shooter that breaks the mold from modern shooters of the day can be a great time, but with somewhat claustrophobic maps and tiny teams, I worry it may be veering a bit too far from what made its predecessors so beloved.

The best thing Tribes 3: Rivals has going for it is that it doesn’t feel like every other modern first-person shooter, and instead of sprinting around tight corners with automatic weapons, you’re gliding down hillsides to pick up speed, then boosting into the air with your jetpack to fly across the map while firing silly Hasbro-looking weapons that shoot brightly colored projectiles. Advancing cautiously or hiding behind the environment in hopes of avoiding enemy fire will almost always get you killed in a matter of seconds, and even having played other Tribes games before, it took me a couple hours of getting hopelessly destroyed by the competition before I was able to break myself of bad habits learned from more mundane shooters and embrace pure chaos once more.

Gaining and maintaining momentum at all times and learning how to handle mostly inaccurate weapons made worse by said momentum definitely take some getting used to. But that learning curve is definitely worth the trouble, because Tribes 3 does a great job at recreating the excessively fast and disorderly combat that has few dull moments. And like previous titles, capture the flag remains the primary game mode, which makes all that focus on movement even more valuable when you’re stealing a flag or chasing after a would-be thief in a footrace where every second counts. Every match has at least one or two nail-biting moments where whoever can keep their skis sliding along the fastest will win the day. Moments like that are just downright good fun.

But Tribes 3: Rivals also makes some bold redesign decisions that deviate pretty significantly from the series’ established formula – namely, that matches only have five players on each team: a massive reduction from the 32-player matches in Tribes: Ascent and 128 players in Tribes 2. This means maps are smaller and the action is much less chaotic, which felt pretty out of place for the next entry in a series that has historically been a huge fan of massive multiplayer headcounts. That’s not to say that matches were particularly dull, though. Quite the opposite, I found a pretty consistent flow of intense encounters with other players that kept me on my toes, but the drastic change in tone and scale definitely still felt a bit out of place.

It’s clear that Hi-Rez hopes the series can reinvent itself with these changes, and there are without a doubt some advantages to smaller team sizes. For example, I definitely felt like my personal contribution mattered a whole lot more, and my ability to play a role in the success or failure of my team was great. There’s also the matter of matchmaking and lobby wait times, which are sure to be reduced with you only needing 10 players to start a match versus 32 players from the last game – and with old-school shooters not usually drawing the same massive player bases as the likes of Call of Duty, that might end up mattering a whole lot to the game’s long-term health.

Tribes 3: Rivals is still in the early stages of its development, and so far there’s a whole lot to like about its unique, refreshingly over-the-top action. Only time will tell if this classic shooter will be able to reinvent itself and stand out with a modern audience.