Tribes: Ascend Review

The Olympics are boring.

The fastest man in the world cannot outrun a cheetah. Sharks swim faster than Micheal Phelps. Team sports are mere sports. And athletes winning and not winning medals do not show how awesome their countries are. 

Tribes: Ascend, however, is awesome.

Imagine a first-person shooter. Good. Now imagine one in which you're zooming around a large map at one to three hundred miles per hour using a "skiing" mechanic (going down slopes speeds you up). Imagine you have a jet pack that quickly recharges whenever you don't use it. Now imagine this as a red vs. blue game. That's Tribes: Ascend. And it's free to play. Why even read this review? Just try it! There's nothing like it. If you don't like it, then at least you'll have done something new.

"But game critic! Everyone knows Free-To-Play isn't REALLY free-to-play."
.....What?
"We mean that in free-to-play games, if you're willing to spend money, you can buy perks that make your whatevers stronger than those of non-spenders?"
.....And?
"That's not fair!"
Okay, yeah, you do level up certain bad-assifiers faster by spending some cash. But why care? The game is fun and free. It's not to be taken seriously. And it's so fun being in a close match, while shooting and skiing at 200 miles per hour.
".....Wow, that sounds awesome!"
Penis.

Ah, I have one complaint: when you're on a team that's really losing , the buzz gets killed. But even then, if you play well, you'll still get XP, which you can use to purchase stuff that, if you wanted sooner, you would have paid cash for; it's unfair; but, well, this isn't exactly the world's elites stealing from us we're talking about.....Or maybe it is. Maybe this game was created specifically to distract our children from studying enough to compete with the prep school-prepped inheritors of the control of the human race.

Erm. I mean - it's just Tribes: Ascend.

Tribes: Ascend features capture the flag, team death match, domination (think Unreal Tournament, where the idea is to hold parts of the map, and the more parts you hold the faster your team's score goes up); there's also a mode called "Arena," which I didn't get to because one has to reach level 8 to unlock it.