Rating: 4/10
Overview:
TRON: Evolution is an immersive 3rd person action game that pulls players onto the digital grid of TRON. Explore TRON's cities using free running mobility, navigate among unique rebel factions, and fight an epic battle against a dictator's seemingly unstoppable army as the powerful System Monitor. Seamlessly connect from single player story mode into 10 person multiplayer battles with martial arts inspired light disc combat and thrilling light cycle chases in the prequel story to the TRON: Legacy.
My Views
I was honestly pleasantly surprised with this game, don't get me wrong it is a train wreck of a game but you can clearly see that the developers have put some actual effort into this game and I am truly grateful that they decided to have this game be a prequel to the film rather than be a companion to it, allowing them to tell a full creative story.
Movement and Camera work
I have had to write a separate section for the camera and movement in this game because they are the absolute worst parts of the game and they really need to be highlighted.
​
The camera in this game is screwed, the frame rates constantly drop out and the camera itself is way to sensitive, normally I wouldn't moan about this but there is no way in the game to change the camera sensitivity and when one of your games main mechanics is fast paced parkour action, the camera really needs to be spot on. The movement of the character is fine when running normally or fighting masked goons but when you enter sprint mode to do any of the platforming sections the character becomes impossible to control and the game has very little intuition within the platforming sections.
​
The worst offender of this is having the player having to manually grab ledges when you run up all wall, what makes this so difficult is that the grab button is mapped to the same button as jump, meaning 9 times out of 10 you will run up a wall press the grab button and instead your character will just jump off the wall. The only way I found to prevent this is to be holding the grab button before you start wall running, but with the camera being so Janky you will never know if you need your character to jump between walls or grab a ledge until it is too late and you die.
Another factor of the game that makes these two things annoying is the environmental dangers that you have to avoid, everywhere in the levels there is yellow pixelated goo and the floors and walls that will damage you character if you walk into them, which normally is just a bit of an annoyance but in this game it is a true danger because you just can't avoid it.
​
All of this combined really hinders the enjoyment of the game, and some times in can be infuriating, which is shame because if this was fixed I think it would be the best movie tie in game I have ever played and it could have been rated a lot higher.
Gameplay
The gameplay once you get past the movement and camera issues is actually really enjoyable, the combo system is varied and fun with plenty of different combos to pull off. The fighting is split into light, medium and heavy attacks that can be linked together on the floor or in mid air and create visually pleasing combos. They try to introduce different enemy types to mix up combat but they do it in the most uninspired way possible, each new enemy comes in with a text card introducing the type and level of the enemy as the attack type that is strongest against them. I did appreciate this because all enemy types look almost identical and it would have been difficult to differentiate between them but it could have been so much more interesting, just a short cinematic and dialogue would have been nice
Lastly the first boss you face is just a tutorial and although I didn't finish the game I get the impression that he will either be the final boss or one of the last, and as he was so easy to beat by blocking 3 times in a row, then parrying 3 times and so on. This was disappointing, I don't mind an easy tutorial like boss but it doesn't need to be so blatantly obvious, it just brings you out of the experience so much when there is a little counter in the corner telling you how many times you blocked.
My last thoughts
When I loaded this up I was expected so much less than I got, I thought it would be the lowest and cheapest cash grab game that they could make, but it truly surprised me that any effort went in to it at all. If they could fix the camera and movement issues I would of played this until the end and given it a lot higher score because the bits that are good are defiantly worth playing but the rest it is just infuriating.
Until next time... Toby