TRON 2.0 (2003)

I get the feeling this will look cool but be a bit fiddly to play...

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I've started on the tutorial. Seems nicely presented so far, all the little polygonal shapes buzzing around and flashing at you. Seems like there's a lot of hacker rpg lite stuff where you have to fix corrupt files and transfer energy to stuff (on top of the "find the yellow key" = "get the file permission" stuff). Could be interesting and fun, could be annoying and fiddly - same for the disc combat.

My heart did sink when I saw mention of having to move quietly to avoid being spotted by enemies. If the stealth's as shitty as in Monolith's NOLF games, I may not be playing for too long...

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So this is a pretty typical Monolith game. Endless fiddling with menus, stupidly harsh health mechanics and combat (I should not be struggling with the first enemy in the game), and stealth that simply does not work. The setting is well rendered (fucking hell, the game's got me doing shitty programming puns now) but TRON actually isn't a great licence for a video game - the environments get samey very quickly and as with the film the amount of emotionless line deliveries are pretty wearing too, like paying a game mostly populated by Mr Freeze clones.

I've managed to save myself into a corner already, so I may actually quit this game very early on. I'll probably give an earlier save one more shot, but I'm in a section where they've taken away my ranged weapon (the disc) so I'm even more vulnerable than usual, and the place is swarming with enemies who have super-accurate ranged weapons. It's fucking stupid. I'm actually talking myself out of giving it another go, here.

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Fuck this game. The combat is insanely harsh even on easy mode, the projectile-rebound move requires split-second timing, doesn't rebound in a helpful way and is useless if there's more than one enemy attacking, and you have to go to your stats screen every time you want to swap weapons.

I tried to give it a chance, I went back to the earlier save and managed to get my disc back, but it's a struggle to get through every encounter. Fuck it.

Rating: Red.