Midair

This would be an amazing game if it didn't lock all of the playstyle customization behind a level grind. They somehow made a free to play economy even worse than Tribes Ascend.

As someone who has been waiting years for a successor to Tribes 1/2: this is not the successor to Tribes that you're looking for. There's a half dozen issues working in concert here to completely ruin the feel of the game: 1) Air control is a joke. You don't have any. Your jet thrust is weak when you try to use it directionally, nor do you have the energy pool necessary to thrust long enough in any direction to fine tune your approach to a landing. This especially matters, because... 2) Terrain layout is abysmal. On every map I played, there are no coherent movement lines between any relevant locations. Your only option to get from A to B is to pray that you land on the exact right pixel on a circular crater that the downslope points where you want to go, but good luck hitting that pixel because of #1. Additionally, the map layout also suffers from a bad design choice where the walls of every depression are basically vertical, which prevents you from ever translating vertical to horizontal momentum effectively. Even if you could... 3) Probably as a consequence of the weak jet thrust that #1 entails, you have virtually NO control over ski direction. Every little wobble in the landscape can and will throw you off your intended course. Even if this wasn't a problem, the map designers went and threw random non-terrain boulder objects on some of the best-positioned slopes, preventing you from actually utilizing them as a proper ski vector. All of these poor movement issues ruin the feel enough as it is, but they also compound pretty seriously because... 4) Weapon velocity inheritance is insane. I could pretty routinely Spinfusor chasers out of the sky while at full speed in a Light flag runner config in Tribes, and I have absolutely no idea what direction that disc launcher is going to fire when I pull the trigger. Even the chaingun inherits enough momentum to be useless as a tool on either side of the chase. This is all really unfortunate, because... 5) Static defenses are ludicrously, stupidly powerful Mines are basically a one-hit kill against Lights, and per #4, you can't aim well enough while on a flag run to pop the mines on the approach. Even if you could, it doesn't matter because the deployable turrets have ridiculously godlike aim (which you basically can't dodge, because you have no air control). If you're familiar with Tribes 2, you're dealing with a hybrid Spider/Landspike turrets (deploy anywhere inside or outside) that shoot Spinfusor discs (explosive area with momentum knockback) at Spider turret projectile velocities (no time to react, no ability to do so even if you could). It's just bad. I would have absolutely loved to have someone rip off Tribes 2. It's my favorite multiplayer game of all time, and a love letter to those mechanics would be a wonderful thing to see. If you're going to rip off the Tribes series (and please, PLEASE do), do better. My biggest problem though, is that beyond all of the mechanical issues, this feels entirely joyless. There's no sensation of speed even on the rare occasions you do get a good line going. The weapons sound bland and hollow. They've gone for Red vs Blue instead of Storm vs Inferno (or Starwolf vs Blood Eagle). There's no very insistant-sounding man Perhaps the most telling and galling thing here is that they've gone to all the trouble to rip the core concepts of Tribes, from weapons, to loadouts, to the idea of movement, game modes, everything, and they didn't even have the stones to make VGS yell "Shazbot!". VGS is there alright, but instead it's a very bland and boring "Grrrrrr!" Barring a significant overhaul, this game is shazbot.

A really fun and deep game with an obscene skill curve and ceiling. It has had a rough time with server issues and development problems but the game itself is great.

Problem #1: Physics are stiff and counter-intuitive, and level layout makes it difficult to glide around Tribes-style. You have to "GIT GUD" before you manage to do so, which is why this game is turning off new players, and is basically dying. Tribes:Ascend wasn't easy to grasp, but gliding around the hills was easy to get a hang of, as the level design was generous and straightforward in that regard even in its worst maps. Problem #2: This problem is shared with Tribes: Ascend. Unreal engine is strained by the networking requirements of FPS-Z shooters. Both MidAir and Tribes: Ascend inaccurately draw object positions when your ping is above 30. Yes, you can "GIT GUD" and adapt to this problem, but it is a symptom of bad netcode in Unreal Engine. Older games like Quake Wars didn't have this problem. In fact, even older Unreal games (UT2003, UT2004) had seemingly better netcode, or maybe they just worked better due to two-dimensional movement. Problem #3: As part of awful level design, bases have a weird, disconnected layout. The importance of deployables and generator is downplayed. Tribes: Ascend had superficial base design compared to original Tribes 1/2 already. Original Tribes games had its own "indoor game" on some levels, where you could spend the entire game just being an engineer who maintains the base, and it would be both important and fun. That angle is lost here. Nobody's ever inside the base. Problem #4: The game shipped without a voice announcer! No "Your team's flag was taken" here! The UI is cumbersome. The ammo counters for weapons are not prominent. Problem #5: Developers are slow and largely oblivious to feedback.

TL;DR: Midair is a true successor for Tribes 1 & Tribes 2 Classic for the FPS-Z genre. Far better than Tribes: Ascend and not using the money grabbing tactics that Hi-Rez used. By purchasing Early Access, you are buying a 'Progression Pass' which will unlock all gameplay content FOREVER. Many folks from the Tribes communities had an issue with the price before, and now I think it is very reasonable for you to buy in as this is the price it'll be staying at until the full free to play release. If you've never played any of the above games, Midair is very friendly to newbies on the learning curve compared to past titles and great fun as soon as you manage to hit a disk in someone's face. The movement might seem difficult at first, but in the end will the reason why you keep opening the game up. I've followed this game since its beginning all the way back when it was planned as 'Legions: Overdrive 2.0', and then 'Project Z', and then finally 'Midair'. Releasing on steam is only the latest step on a long eventful journey. You will not find a developer team who are based all over the world that has spent more of their free time and passion on making a 'indie' title with AAA production values. That being said, the game is still in a unfinished state from a full release hence why it is still in early access, so don't be surprised if you find bugs or the game balance is a little off, BUT! the developers want your feedback, no matter how small or insignificant. About Midair's gamemodes: Midair has a strong gamemode called 'LCTF' and is what I suspect will be the main gameplay mode for those who just want pure jetpack 5v5 Capture the Flag. It is pretty much feature complete and over half the maps for the mode are finialised with more on the way. 'Base' or just 'CTF' is trying to be angled as the main gameplay mode for all, which involves greater numbers of players, generators to power the base and vehicles to use. While I think this mode will be fairly popular, I don't think it'll catch on massively with competitive play and LCTF will be the main competitive mode. 'Arena' is another gamemode similar to Clan Arena from Quake, once you're dead you're out of the round, first team to 5 rounds wins. 'Rabbit' is final gamemode and involves only one flag and your objective is to hold the flag as long as possible to score points. More gamemodes are planned, with a vote planned for the kickstarter backers soon, with three gamemodes on offer: Jackpot, Hunters or Duel. In terms of game performance, the game runs really well on the GPU, but if you have a weaker CPU your fps will be lower the more people that join. This is probably the weakest part of the plan to make the game Free to Play, as I have an i5-2500k @ 4.5ghz and struggle to maintain consistent 120 frames once there's more than about 12 players and it only gets worse the more players that join, so for a full CTF server, it will be struggle, especially if you are competitive. Optimisations will be coming, but because of the load that Unreal Engine 4 puts on your machine, I doubt this will improve much. Currently I have a thread on the Midair forums that goes indepth on graphical options using Unreal Engine, so if you are struggling to run the game, try my configurations out: https://forums.playmidair.com/threads/fyrs-midair-configuration-thread.944/ So what isn't in the game yet that will be in the full release? - More completed maps. - Demos. - Parties. - Clan support. - In depth stats. - 3 additional weapons. - Cosmetics. What will probably be coming after release (in no particular order)? - Matchmaking. - Community map making. - More gamemodes. - Advanced demo tools (keyframes etc). - UI Customisation. - Additional Weapons. - More cosmetics. Now is a great time to jump on the bandwagon and try Midair out, it's only going to go up from here.

Being someone who really loved Tribes (original + mods) CTF, I have to say that I'm glad that this game was made, however I feel like what made tribes great (the freedom to just do whatever, mod it, run that as a server, etc) is missing here and it's what gave that game years beyond its original launch. What I wanted to do when I started this game: 1) Walk right into a match, try to get the feel for things 2) Try a couple of loadouts, see how it felt. What I got was: 1) Tutorials on sliding and jetpacking (is this really necessary?!) 2) Loadouts locked, Progressions through loadouts? NO! That's really terrible. The progression mechanics are not for games like this. Serve the audience, not the publisher. Let players explore. Let them mod. Let them do things you didn't design the game to do. Leave it open and leave it alone, other than critical bug fixes and platform support. My recommendations 1) Relaunch the game reconfigured to be entirely open. No progression, no time-played based loadouts. Anyone can use anything. 2) Let people run modded servers - make it an open platform. I want a server where everyone has mid-air boosters, mid-air brakes and 1 shot kill machine guns. It'll be crazy - and fun. If the game becomes more of a platform than a game, it has a chance of long term success. Despite all that, thanks for making it. I still appreciate it!

I AM A TRIBES PLAYER, AND I KNOW THIS GAME HAS SOME ISSUES IN COMPARISON TO IT I have been surprised that I have found myself launching this game every other day to play a bit in it. Finding a new Tribes game is like trying to chase your first high. You won't find it again outside of your first Tribes game. This gives me a little hit. Not enough to satisfy me, in fact it makes me more hungry. But it gives me a little hope for the future. I won't go on and on about the issues I find with the game. There are more than enough reviews about those. I am able to look beyond and adapt a bit in order to get a little bit of that Tribes feeling back. I will take a bad Tribes-a-like game than almost any other.

Brings me back to Tribes. Man I miss that game...