Tron 2.0

The Good
Let me get this off my chest: I'm a geek. A MAJOR geek. Tron was one of those childhood movies (though I was born after it came out) that left a lasting impression on me, probably second only to Terminator 2. It had all of the "right stuff": technical mumbo-jumbo that, judging by the time context, did not piss me off even a bit (well, maybe besides the "bit" having three modes...) and generally accurate to boot; absolutely astounding visuals, which I find beautiful even today; excellent music; excellent actors; excellent storyline (particularly when considering the time frame). The overall "feel" of the movie is something I have never, ever encountered afterwords: a sense of mystique and technological wizardry that can only be a labor of love. For eons I have wished for - and dreaded - a sequel; I wanted more, but I was afraid of being disappointed (Terminator 3... <sob>). And I was quite dumbfounded when the sequel came out in the form of a video game. When the game came out, I didn't know what to think; I was worried that the game would disappoint, in which case a childhood dream of mine would be crushed. I waited over two weeks (a lifetime, when it comes to things I really want...) and decided to take the risk and be done with it.

Boy, I was NOT disappointed.

Tron 2.0 has all of the "right stuff". First and foremost, it is quite possibly the most beautiful game ever to grace my monitor. I have gasped over the latest Doom 3 trailer; almost fainted over the Half Life 2 technology demo. Tron 2.0 left me gaping like an idiot. For days I daydreamed and talked only of Tron 2.0; this is the kind of thing that only genuine geeks and gamers can understand. The damn thing haunted me; I couldn't wait for the day to end so that I could shut off the lights, put some headphones on and stay up playing the game until I couldn't keep my eyes open. The sense of being in the Tron world is simply unbelievable, simple indescribable... you have to experience it to understand. Obviously the game was designed by people after my own heart: people who understood the movie, people who lived it and wanted to keep the legacy going... and with the help of the Lithtech-derived engine, 20 years after the movie the Tron universe comes to life once again, in glorious, 32 bit colour real time. The game is gorgeous... but that is merely a word. No screenshot can convey how absolutely minimalistic, beautifully digital this game is.

Fortunately enough, that is not all. Tron 2.0 is graced with some of the best music ever to be heard in a computer game. The music is nothing short of amazing; more-over, it has restored my faith in dynamic scores. Not since X-Wing has a computer game been graced with music that seamlessly integrates with the game; never in the foreground, never quite in the background, always adjusting and changing to what is happening... always subtle, never annoying. If there was a way to just listen to the in-game music, I would have. It is incredible that the composer has managed to maintain the strange, unique musical style from the original movie, integrate modern electronic elements so seamlessly and keep everything under tight enough control to allow Direct Music to kick in. The in-game music is nothing short of amazing.

Story? Plenty of that to go around. Tron 2.0 stays faithful to the movie, and walks you through an incredibly immersive, incredibly diverse digital universe. Here again the game engine kicks in to show you amazing footage of what it would be like to stroll around a sort of internet cyber-city; to traverse the circuitry of an ancient mainframe computer (and even overclock it!), even a PDA - everywhere you go, plot elements pop up, missions are always diverse and the scenery is astounding. Oh yes, there are lightcycle arenas aplenty, and they look better than ever. Who needs a Cray Y when you have DirectX?...

Finally, the voice acting is terrific: Bruce Boxleitner plays Alan-1 again, Cindy Morgan plays Ma3a... I only wish they'd found how to keep David Warner and Jeff Bridges, but I guess you can't have it all.

The Bad
It is very rare that I find no fault with a game; Tron 2.0 is no exception to this rule. That being said, it is extremely rare that I so readily forget a game's flaws; Tron 2.0 is a definite exception to this rule.

There are some frustrating scenes in Tron 2.0; most of them involve the lightcycle arenas. The computer AI is devilishly quick on reflexes, and incredibly stupid on strategy. I'm not particularly good at lightcycles (wasn't very good playing good ole' Novatron either...), so this made for some very frustrating time trying to get through some of those scenes.

The boss levels are generally fine, but some are ridiculously annoying; plus, there was no reason for the last level to contain slight spoiler three damn bosses, one would've been enough.

Battle system has a relatively high learning curve; this is not quite a straightforward shooter.

Regardless, it took me exactly two minutes apiece to forget these shortcomings...

The Bottom Line
An incredible game in every sense. Well thought, well designed, well executed. A treat for '70s/'80s geeks. One of those rare games that one will ALWAYS remember.

The Good
Tron 2.0 was a pleasant surprise. Like most media franchises translated to games of recent years (007 Nightfire, Dukes of Hazzard, Die Hard, the list goes on), most translations are less than enjoyable. Tron 2.0 thankfully bucked this trend by involving some of the original talent of the movie and combined them with an engaging storyline.

I'll be honest: I'm a huge Tron fan. I was 12 when the movie came out, and coupled with my budding love of computing, it made a solid impression on me that very few movies have. So when I saw pre-release screenshots of the game I had high hopes... and thank goodness, it turned out great. The visuals, sound, and level design not only matched the movie, they exceeded it by leaps and bounds.

For experienced gamers not familiar with the movie, Tron 2.0 puts a few spins on story-driven shooters in a couple of ways. For one, an RPG element is introduced via "build notes", which you can collect to eventually increase your stats (maximum health, maximum ammo, etc.). There are the usual assortment of weapons, from short-range melee and energy-draining weapons to a long-range sniping weapon. One light strategic twist is that each weapon takes up a certain number of "memory slots", and each major area you enter has a different "memory configuration" that changes the quantity and order of the slots, so you have to think about how you're going to accomplish certain tasks and which combination of armor, tools, and weapons to use to do so.

Fan of the movie or not, the visuals are living wonderment: The old mainframe area looks just like the movie (but crisper); virus-ridden areas are cracked, broken, and sickly; the "internet" is a vast metropolis with spires reaching miles into the sky; and so on. The designers enlisted the help of Syd Mead (the original designer of the visuals in the 1982 movie) and it shows -- the place looks gorgeous and I would almost recommend you play Tron 2.0 just to see how everything looks with all the chrome turned on. If you have an advanced video card (I played with an ATI 9500 Pro) you can even enable glowing hazy lightsources for an organic, just-like-the-movie look.

Most modern games significantly lack audio punch, but the audio (especially the music) is easily the best I've heard in recent years. Sound effects like footsteps, throwing the disc, and especially the light cycles are dead-on accurate for the movie, and sound effects for new elements of the game are logical evolutions of the movie sound. Some of the villain voices are suitably campy, but the characters Mercury (voiced by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) and the main character Jet are done well. The addition of original movie voice talent Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan gives Tron 2.0 a slight push to the nostalgic (and, being movie and TV veterans of over 20 years, their performances are among the best in the game). Finally, the music is arguably the star of the entire game: Not only is it electronic (without being hard-core electronica), but it weaves parts of Wendy Carlos' original themes all throughout the main score very skillfully. And true to Monolith's earlier shooter No One Lives Forever, the music is interactive! You are alerted to danger through a change in the music's tone, and when that threat is eliminated, the music morphs back into an appropriate mood for exploring. It is much more seamless than the NOLF music changes. I can't express enough how much the music made an impression on both me and gameplay.

If you are a fan of the movie, the storyline (shown via in-game cinematic cutscenes, archived "video" clips, and most effectively in various emails left throughout the system) explains what happened after the end of the movie and further develops the story and characters. If you ever wanted a sequel to Tron, Tron 2.0 does a more than acceptable job.

(And if you ever played the Tron arcade game's "light cycle" subgame at the local arcade when you were in your teens, the updated version adds some new twists: It's 3D, you can vary the speed of your cycle a bit more extensively, and there are various power-ups littered around the area.)

The Bad
As much admiration as I have for the game, no game is perfect. Some little things bothered me that detracted from the experience a few times:

• Most of the new characters introduced in Tron 2.0 (I don't want to give spoilers by naming names) were never really explored or developed in any depth. This was slightly disappointing for those of us who really bought into the story (ie fans of the movie).
• In the initial retail release of the game -- the one played for this review -- you couldn't skip any light cycle scenes. No big deal if you enjoyed them, but there is one light cycle marathon (three battles in a row) that started to get on my nerves after I kept failing it for over an hour. (However, a downloadable patch remedies this so be sure to patch the game before you start playing.)
• The game's biggest draw, the visual design, works against you in a few places where you need to throw a switch or trigger -- everything is so ultra-bright-neo-modern that it is part to find the switches in two places.
• The ending is a bit of a let-down, I'm sorry to say. It's a very fun ride getting there, but it is simply too easy to beat the final boss (I played it on Normal difficulty) as there are situations you can put yourself in where you can attack the boss but he can't attack you. Worse, the ending cinematic was way too short.

The Bottom Line
Fans of the movie simply have to pick this up. It is a brilliant realization of the movie, representing it perfectly without ruining anything. And even if you don't know of or like the movie, the game itself is a capable shooter with a unique visual style that you owe to yourself to check out.

The Good
I wasn't very much surprised when I first saw it, but over time I realised that Tron 2.0 is actually the best FPS I ever played. It's as simple as that - if you add up everything that Tron 2.0 has to offer, no other FPS can surpass it.

First thing you see is the graphical splendour of the game. Even with all settings upped to maximum it plays smoothly on my GF4 Ti4200. Hi-res textures, familiar Tron glow, huge fantastic structures, this simply looks amazing. Add to that very well animated characters with high quality models, great effects and weapons that are absolutely cool and original.

Second thing that you notice about Tron 2.0 are levels. They aren't too complex, they aren't too linear and they aren't repetitive. Almost perfect levels. :)

Then you have a great story. There was a certain lack of cohesion, due to the necessary shooting part of the FPS (sometimes you forget why are you shooting), but other than that it was engaging and enjoyable.

Finally, Tron 2.0 is full of little things that add to the fun. The atmosphere of the movie and of the computer world in general was recreated brilliantly. Spam message on the Internet, funny comments in the code like "Tanks read-only and indestructible. Enjoy. :)", "Progress Bar" where programs hang out and countless other things like that certainly add a lot to the game. There is also a lot of innovation in the game mechanics. The subroutines were very original and because of that the way you approached the weapons was completely different from all other games. Upgrading your subroutines (from Alpha to Beta to Gold) and selecting the active ones depending on the game situation allowed for a great variety of game styles. While some people claimed that the Disc was too powerful and other weapons were useless, I found weapons to be carefully balanced, with optimal strategy being always selecting the right tool for the job.

The Bad
I had some problems with sound. With many enemies around my weapons' sounds didn't work. I had to go to options and disable/enable EAX. I also found that positional 5.1 sound didn't work (for me it was only stereo).

Some cutscenes could be made a bit longer for extra exposition and not to feel rushed.

This isn't really a flaw, but there could have been a little bit more interactivity in the levels and may be things like side-quests.

The Bottom Line
The best first-person shooter as of September 2003.

The Good
Seems nostalgia works much better than originality these days to sell games, but that's ok, as I have no problem revisiting any of the coolest stuff from our childhood updated for the current times. Tron escaped me however, as I think I was a couple of years too late to catch on the Tron craze (actually... was there ever a Tron "craze"?) anyway, the point is that while interested I wasn't exactly weak at the knees when I heard about Tron 2.0, however the end result by far exceeded my expectations providing one of the more enjoyable fps experiences I've had in recent memory.

The concept is based as a sequel of sorts to the movie, with the action taking place years after the events of Tron. You take the role of the son of Tron's protagonist (I'll be damned if I remember his name) as he annoys his father (now a big-ass technician in the company) by being a "cool-nerd" videogame posterboy just like you saw in magazines like PCXL... Anyway, this wouldn't be a Tron game unless you didn't get zapped into a computer, and that's exactly what happens. Suddenly you become a digital rambo (just look at the box cover) and have to fight your way in the trippy neon world of Tron.

However Tron isn't your average generic fps, a lot of thought was placed in the development of a substantially engrossing rpg angle which governs your abilities and skills in the game. Basically you are a program, right? So you can upgrade yourself and manage your resources to fit every situation. Collect build notes scattered around the levels and eventually you'll upgrade your program version (aka: level up) which allows you to add points to your base abilities that control your speed, damage, energy storage, etc. Equipment and weaponry are (with some exceptions) actually program sub-routines, which you must load up in your assigned memory in order to use, however the memory available for you to use (represented as a series of equipment slots) varies with each level, with the ones staged in giant mainframes offering ample room for you to load up everything you desire and the ones in a PDA for instance leaving you with just a few cramped slots to load basic features like armor or special equipment. The sub-routines are also upgradable (from alpha, to beta to gold) and thus you can enhance their performance as well as decrease the slots of memory they consume. Obviously all of these options are not infinite in the sense that you can't just upgrade everything, so choosing the right options isn't always a straightforward choice which, of course, only adds to the tremendous gameplay depth.

As the game progresses you'll fight your way through a series of exciting levels based around the magic "computer-universe" of Tron, updated to include much more widespread elements from today's technology such as the internet and virus threats (which can infect you and severely cripple your abilities). Your enemies include the classic "controller" programs that compose the systems security and operational forces (those funky red guys) as well as virus-infected programs (mutated "green" monsters) and even other digitized users out to hunt you down. While the gameplay includes a lot of varied objectives and sneaking, this is an fps, so you'll eventually have to dish it out with an array of weapons that include the classic disc as well as other "Tron-ized" versions of classic fps weapons, such as the sniper rifle (called the "LOL" :)), also making a return from the movie you have the light-cycle races, which are basically "nibbles" sequences sprinkled all over the game, but exceptionally well done and quite challenging with multiple opponents, obstacles and power-ups (in fact it's available as a stand-alone game mode).

The real deal-breaker for fans of the movie however, was the replication of the Tron universe and the results were great there too. Monolith perfectly nailed the "vibe" of the movie, first by using the latest iteration of their LithTech engine to craft a near identical representation of the Tron look, complete with one of the earliest implementations of the glow technology (now seen in practically every DX9 game) that gave the game that hazy neon glow just like in the movie. Furthermore since the gameworld is mostly composed of flat textures (with some transparencies at worst) you'll be able to run it in basically any graphic board out there, with only the "glow" option being a feature better suited for newer cards. Sound-wise the game is also a winner, with sfx ripped right from the movie and a music score that takes the original themes and runs with them crafting a dynamic soundtrack that defines what a dynamic soundtrack should be. Plus, Disney secured most of the original cast for voiceovers and even included the totally gratuitous appearance of Rebecca Rom... uh.. Romjin? eh.. you know, Mystique!.

The Bad
For as good as it is I can't help bitching about a few things in Tron 2.0. First of all while the story promised a lot initially, in the final quarter of the game it just all comes apart at the seams, it doesn't amaze me that the game was based on a never-produced movie deal, as the story combines the potential and inconsistencies of an incomplete script draft. This is evident in some of the lesser subplots, but most evidently in the final parts of the game, as the story is rapidly wrapped up in the classic "damn man, we gotta finish this quick coz we ran out of ideas!" manner and quickly boils down everything so as to solve most of the main plotlines and give you the Happy Ending(tm) a Disney product demands. Interesting characters like Rebecca's are so underdeveloped that they end up being nothing but cardboard cutouts, and I think Tron himself should have at least made a cameo... worst of all.... SUPER SOLDIERS AGAIN????? What the hell is wrong with the guys at Monolith?? It seems that every game they make is based on the same storyline!! Man.. I swear if I play another fps where the plot revolves around supersoldiers I'm going to throw up.... (update: I played another one, but no, I couldn't barf... damn you bastards!)

Finally the game has the serious downside of making the player feel like the fucking king nerd of dorkiness. Really, enemies shout out stuff like "in your interface" and you have to battle data fragmentation and viral contamination, indestructible enemies are labeled "read-only" and teleportation includes stuff like url and ip addresses. Mission objectives include overclocking cpus, escaping from formatting and compiling source code, etc. etc. etc... I mean, my friends and I just laughed our asses off, but it's the nerdiest game I've ever played, better hide it if some jocks come to your house, because they are gonna beat the crap out of you harder than if you were wearing a custom made Star Trek uniform.

The Bottom Line
Despite a substantial generic quality in the story and making you feel as the dorkiest geek in the universe Tron 2.0 is a fantastically deep and engrossing fps that adds just the right amount of rpg gameplay to enrich the fps experience without taking away the focus from an excellent action game. Truly recommended, specially for nerds.

The Good
I certainly enjoyed the movie "Tron", but I haven't seen it in years and other than a brief memory involving those disc they throw around -- and of course the lightcycles -- I don't remember anything about it and it doesn't really rank among my favorite movies list. So when I picked up Tron, I wasn't particularly interested in the Tron-ninn...ninity...of it all, but it looked interesting enough, it was getting good reviews, and hey, lightcycles, eh?

I am quite pleased I picked this up. Whether or not you're a fan of the movie, I think you'll enjoy this game. Heck, you don't even need to know what the movie is to enjoy the game. The game is not based on the movie; it's just another take on the same idea. And it works brilliantly.

The graphics are wonderful, and there's something in this game that I don't think HAS been done before -- every plot-character looks different. Not just a different texture, but they actually all look different. Different sized noses, different looking faces, etc. It jumped out at me, because most games I play, the only difference between characters is usually texture changes, and that's it. It was great seeing different characters that had an individual voice and look to them.

The graphics are superb. Not only does the Tron world look just like it should, but the 'real world' scenes also look incredible. Nothing looks like 'filler' in either sense. The Tron world is filled with primitive polygons and lines along the wall that form some sort of unnecessary design stand out at you. Your suits are filled with that glowy-blue stuff; programs speak with that odd distorted warbled computer-like voice. It's straight out of the movie, and again, the guys here did it absolutely perfect. In an extreme contrast, the real world looks just like the real world should. It's obvious there was a talented group of artists working on this game, and I was pleased to find they spent just as much time working on both worlds, even though the real world is far less significant in the game.

Voice-overs are well done, and the dialogue sounds just like it's coming from a movie, with the dramatic parts being overlaid by a great soundtrack. As well as the voices being great, the character animation is also some of the best I've seen. Quite obviously done with motion-capture technology, it's on par with, say, No One Lives Forever 2 (if you've played that).

The game features an "RPG" system very similar to Deus Ex's. As you do certain tasks, or pick up upgrades, your 'version number' increases, with every 1 version you gain, you gain a level and can upgrade some of your five stats, which include health, energy, weapon efficiency, transfer rate and processor. Each one plays an important part in the game. Along with these stats, you also pick up 'subroutines', which are upgrades and weapons that (provided you have room and you're not needing a defrag ;) ) you can use to aid you in the game. These can become infected by corruption if a corrupted program gets a lucky shot in, forcing you to either abandon your subroutine or anti-virus it. Nothing adds more to a game than these little RPG elements. It's one of the reasons Deus Ex was such a thrill to play, and it does just as well in Tron 2.0.

The game is still a first-person shooter, even with bits of drama, the occasional jumping-puzzle (don't run away! There's not that many and they're not hard at all) and dialogue and cutscenes, the game's main focus is combat, whether it's disc-dueling with an ICP or battling it out in a lightcycle battle. While you have your selection of a number of weapons (each that looks awesome in its Tron-nessence...ense....) your disc will probably by the most used, as it requires no energy to throw and you can block other discs thrown at you.

If this were called by any other name, I would say the level design was pure crap. But in this case, level design is spot-on. Most areas are very basic to look at from a level design point of view (although in-game it looks spectacular, with odd computer-stuff running around off in the distance), but it is as you would expect from Tron. And the bonus is, because of basic level design, the game runs flawlessly on my almost-outdated computer on high detail. The best part, however, is the areas infected by corruption. Those basic design soon become torn to bits with green corruption tearing apart the levels and oozing across the area.

And the levels themselves are great. One level requires you to escape the deadly reformat! Another level you travel back into a very old, old computer and help overclock it! Some levels require you to pass through evil corrupted sectors of computers, and you even get to visit the Internet! And who wouldn't want to spend some time off at the "Progress Bar"?

The story is also great, and told well through cutscenes and dialogue. The ending is appropriate, with a "big bad boss" who was quite a fright, really.

The Bad
Two things that happened in the game made me curious. First, there's a part where you engage in a lightcycle battle -- but there was no reason to! You weren't being forced into it, you weren't using it as a means of escape...you just...decided to go do it. For no reason. Now, it was certainly fun, but it seemed oddly out of place when in one scene you're heading somewhere, and the next you find yourself in a lightcycle, and then the next scene you're where you thought you were going to be after the first one!

The second odd thing was a certain character, Mercury. Be warned: the rest of this paragraph is a spoiler. This chick helps you out early in the game, but due to a format in the server, she loses her memory. The next time you see her, she is back to being nothing more than a program, with a boring yes-or-no attitude and complete loss of her memory. However, at the very end, she greets you again, only she has her memory back. There's never an explanation for this, and it seemed really out of place, as she had no real reason to be there.

More work should have been spent on the final boss level. The boss himself was cool, but it was way too easy to get him stuck so that you could hurt him but he couldn't hurt you. I mean, it wasn't only easy to do, it was almost inevitable.

One thing I didn't like was that, in lightcycle combat, most battles were won by simply trapping the opponent in his own trail. A good tactic, to be sure, but it would make the opponent run circles within his own trail until he had no more room to make a circle. Since the opponents are so damned good at getting just close enough to the edge, it can take up to ten minutes to wait for him to get himself killed, if you trap him at a great enough distance. Meanwhile, you can't progress until the computer has killed himself, so there's not much for you to do except drive around and hope you don't screw up by running into your own trail.

The Bottom Line
A solid game, all around. I highly suggest picking this game up. This is one of the few hyped of first person shooters that I've really enjoyed, as it's one of the few that actually lives up to the hype. Fan of the movie or not -- it's a great game.

The Good
Everything about the TRON world is beautifully constructed. Every single thing in the game has the glowing TRON look (may be diminished on less than highest video settings) that makes the world distinct and everything stand-out. Monolith has done a wonderful job of giving an update to the TRON world which still making everything seem like it belongs and seem in place. Changes between the movie and this game are usually well-explained by characters, help files or email and you can even see where familiar objects have been 'updated' into a different type of program.

The world itself and the dialog is definitely the high-point of the game. You'll find yourself running from a system format and watching the world change as files get compressed and see a defrag rearrange your pathways. You'll grab new permissions from dead programs and avoid viral infection from bright yellow intruders. There's lots of voice acting characters to bring this world to life. The objectives of various missions are diverse and unique.

All in all it's a wonderfully done movie conversion (of course they had a 22 year gap between the movie and this game... most movie licenses aren't willing to wait a fraction of that time for development) and I could talk about that all day, I'll try to focus on the gameplay instead. The game is a solid First Person Shooter with all the elements we've come to expect from the genre; Jumping, crouching, strafing, leaning. The weapons too are indicative of most FPS. You have your melee weapons, sniper weapon, rocket weapon... But the difference is, all these weapons may be upgraded and oftentimes other 'programs' may be run to add abilities to the weapon. For instance, your default weapon (and certainly one of the more unique ones... even after 22 years), the Disc, by default can be thrown at the enemy/obstacles (and bounce off of them) and be recalled. Through upgrades you can give additional status effects to the weapon, or you can load the ability to fire 3 at a time or you can load increased accuracy upgrades. It's all more diverse than your average FPS.

I'm a TRON movie fan and I loved this game.

And for fans of lightcycles, they're here too and also a lot of fun in their simplicity.

There's also a fair share of "secret areas", the finding of which will net you better weapons sooner and/or build upgrades which can increase your stats beyond those of a player who does not find them.

The Bad
So what didn't I like? Well... er... not much. I suppose it would be the 'locked access' areas in the levels that are unopenable by any means (I'd love to explore and see every single thing ;)

At the time of writing this review, I have not finished the game... so I can not comment on the later levels or the ending.

The Bottom Line
On the highest graphics modes... THIS IS TRON!!! Every bit of the world has the unique feel to it and all of it feels as if it should somehow belong. Never has plain black 'grid' walls looked so natural and wonderful. I can't help but think how easily the TRON universe would lend itself to an "online world" of some sort... and in fact this game is very linear; but the player probably won't mind because it's a wonderfully evolving storyline and a bright glowing world!

The Good
Well, it has to be said that I was a fan of the Tron movie back in the day. Even when I was a little kid, I loved that movie. So now that I'm a full-grown geek and there is a game coming out based on the movie premise I am all about the idea. And I am happy to say that Tron 2.0 delivers. All of the environments and character models really do look like they come from the movie. I have never played a movie-inspired game before that captured the look and feel of it's property quite like this.

That brings us to the graphics, which are knock-you-out-of-your-chair good. Sure, the computerized Tron universe lends itself to cool graphics, but the latest Lithtech 3d here comes through with incredible translucencies and vivid glowing color displays. It's a sight to behold and will keep impressing throughout the play.

The games action is pretty heavy. You'll have to de-rez (kill) a whole lot of enemies before your through. The AI fights pretty well and keeps things challenging. If anything, they can be a little too good at times.

Your array of weapons is pretty varied, including your classic disc that featured so prominently in the movie and featuring other goodies such a weapon that are essentially a shotgun and another that is a sniper rifle, all Tron-style naturally. The animation of activating your sniper rifle is ice cold cool. You will likely rely primarily on your disc, though, and the various mods there-on.

The game also delivers deeper gameplay than most FPS's in that it has some RPG-type elements. Since you are now essentially a computer program, you are upgradable. As you continue through the game, you can upgrade your core assets such as weapons skill, energy (used to power weapons and abilities), health, etc. As well, you pick up a myriad of sub-routines, some of which use up energy, that you must choose between given your limited sub-routine space (which changed between levels depending on where you are supposed to be). Sub-routines include weapons, viral defenses, armor, increased abilties, and modifications to your disc's powers among other things. The sub-routines even come in three different levels - Alpha, Beta, and Gold - each becoming increasingly effective and taking up less space. Managing all of this is an essential part of the game and added greatly to my experience.

Another great feature of the game is the locations. You don't simply stay on one computer, but move around to a variety of different places, including a massive, crowded internet hub and a the confined space of a PDA. The locations are all very well done and lend themselves well to their themes.

One great part of the game is the light-cycle races. There is light-cycle racing at various points throughout the single-player game and there is also a separate set of races that you can run independently, with the ability to unlock new cycles. The action is fast, frantic, great-looking, and exactly what Tron fans have been wanting.

The storyline was decent enough. You play Jet Bradley, the son of Alan Bradley from the original movie. An evil corporation is attempting to take over Encom in order to gain the digitization technology for their own evil uses. It's your job to stop them. But the real treat for Tron fans will be the emails that one can collect throughout the game telling about things going on in Encom since the events of the Tron movie.

The Bad
The AI could shoot the wings off a fly at a mile off seemingly. That could be a tad frustrating.

The storyline, while decent, could have been better. There were a couple of cringe-worthy moments, such as the mother-computer entity "Ma3a", the inclusion of which was a bit more cheese than I needed. Still, very minor.

There was at least one jumping puzzle which made me want to put my head through my computer monitor. Note to all game designers: Jumping puzzles in FPS games are horrid. Leave them out.

The Bottom Line
Tron 2.0 is the best thing to come out of the Tron license since the movie itself. If you like FPS action, it's a fine example of the genre. If you like Tron, it's a great chance to explore the universe. If you are a fan of both, well, this game is gonna be sweet.

The Good
This game is beautifully crafted. From the blocky geometric structures outlined in brilliant blues and reds and yellows, to the paper-thin trails of the light cycles, Monolith have nailed the look of Tron. The sound quality is good too. Fans will be happy to know the springy footsteps, derezzing enemies and light cycle engine whines from the movie are all replicated here. Even the new weapon effects fit well in this universe.

The Bad
Tron suffers from too many uninspired sections and dull combat. If you were to remove the movie licence, this game would be just another generic shooter. For every memorable moment throughout the game, you also face another forgettable level to run through or another jump puzzle to solve.

The Bottom Line
Tron 2.0 has a unique visual style, like the movie. The gameplay ties into the film so fans should enjoy the nostalgia. Unfortunately, Tron 2.0 suffers from too many dull sections. Nevertheless it does have some real strengths that help make it a solid shooter.