Now, I'd heard a lot of things about the latest video game based on the movie, and some were bad, others good. But, I found myself bored one day with some old games for my PS2 to trade in, and ended up spotting this in my local games store, so decided to give it a try.
Story is this. 20 years after the events of the film, Flynn has moved on to other work, but Alan Bradley remains at Encom. He married the girl from the film (Forget her name), and has a son, Jet (Who you play). Alan's wife died in a lab accident some years ago, Alan is now trying to replicate the 'digitisation' functions, but without the MCP is having little success. His son works at the company, but has an attitude problem. Then, out of the blue, Encom is the subject of a hostile corporate takeover. A bunch of thugs decide to have a 'discussion' with Alan while he's in the lab. But Jet is currently on the phone with his father when the 'discussion' begins. Rushing to help his father out, Jet encounters his father's project Ma3a, an AI, who proceeds to digitise Jet in order to combat a very nasty virus that has infected the computer system.
What I found was an extremely enjoyable FPS (First Person Shooter). My joy started right at the game splash screen, where it played the little 'computer' music midi thing from the movie/arcade game.
The game itself is very nice. Controls are pretty standard, but the visuals really capture the feel of the Tron movie, while still being fairly up to date. I hear it's not quite so pretty if you don't enable the glow effects (I luckily have a very good quality graphics card), but to me, it really did seem like the Tron universe 20 years on.
The game does have some RPG elements, and by that I mean a 'level up' system. As you progress through the game, and succeed at tasks, you gain in 'version number', which is a measure of experience. You start as Jet 0.0, and at each 'milestone' version number, you get an increase to your stats, which include hit points, energy storage space, download speed etc. I ended up as Jet 9.89 when I finished the game.
It's very original for an FPS, where you can constantly download and modify yourself with other programs, including scripts, patches and so on. The weapons are also very nice, but I found myself going back to the wonderful disc, the signature weapon of the Tron universe.
The game does boast a sort of mini-game, and that's the lightcycle arena. It is very very nice, but also very difficult, especially in first person mode. Thankfully, it has a third person view, which makes it easier, but it's still all to easy to crash. A gripe here is that the computer can easily pull off maneuvers and turns that you cannot possibly match, which often means you end up crashing. It can get really frustrating when you're trying the single player quest, but the game patch actually let's you bypass the lightcycle scenes if you want to (I find the patch quite funny really. I have Tron 2.0 v 1.1 on my hard drive.)
There are some great cut scenes using the game's engine, a lot of which refer back to the film, and some others kind of an 'in joke' among the computer wise community. My particular favourite is a meeting with an old program in a system that has been switched off for a number of years. When you meet him, he goes on and on about how his system is 'State of the art, a whopping sixteen megabytes of memory, 50 megabytes hard drive space, with the near light speed fast 14.4 bps modem. You don't get any better than this beast of a specification, let me tell you.'
Final Comment: I love this game, it's immense fun, and it plays different to any other FPS I've played before, but the atmosphere and the different feel of the weapons contributes to that. I'd recommend this to anyone who liked the movie. Even if you're not a big FPS fan (Which I'm not), it's well worth a go.
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