TRON 2.0 is a must-have at least for all who enjoyed the cult classic movie TRON, even though others can enjoy it as well.
Story
The storyline in TRON 2.0 picks up some time after the end of the movie. Alan Bradley, now a highly respected senior programmer working at Encom, tries to get his son Jet a decent job within the company, but Jet spends all his time playing and making games. As they argue about this on the phone, Alan gets unexpected and unwelcome visitors. Jet immediately runs to his father’s lab, but finds no one except Alan’s computer with an A.I. called Ma3a. Ma3a says some of her files are hit by a corruption and without even being asked, Jet is zapped into the computer to help her.
In addition, a company called fCon is trying to buy Encom. Alan Bradley does not approve this, and he knows what’s best for the company since he has been with it from the start. This boils down to Jet having to save both Ma3a, his father and the computer world. It all concludes with a pretty spectacular boss battle.
Graphics:
It’s hard to compare the graphics in TRON 2.0 with any other game, so I won’t.
The game features the exact same style of graphics the original movie had. Simple environments with lots of boxes and straight lines and surfaces. The best feature is the classic neon-glow around the edges of every object on the screen. This makes you feel even more like being in your favorite movie. The glow is more present in 2.0 than in the most of the original movie, but the game would have been a little boring without. The character models are nicely detailed as well. Intricate patterns of differently colored light float around their bodies and makes enemies easy to spot as they light up even more when in combat. Some areas are mildly said huge open space, like inside Fcon’s firewall or the TRON Legacy Code archive. When I say huge, I don’t mean it like free-roaming huge, but it’s really massive and you may feel a little insignificant looking at these areas. The environments are generally gorgeous to look at, and wherever you are there are always something exciting to look at that reminds you of the movie. Every world has each own color, so it’s easy to identify each area.
Sound
The sound is extremely well done. Since the story plays out inside a computer, the sounds and music have to fit to the setting. That goal is indeed achieved. The music is dynamic, just like in NOLF, and each world has a different music style. To compare a couple of worlds, the music from Alan’s desktop PC is relatively calm with lovely plinging sounds, whereas the corrupted server has music filled with suspense, freaky voices and old modem sounds. The Internet has fast business style music with phone rings.
The sound effects are great as well. Everything has an electronic sound, even the voices. It’s hard to really describe the sound without an example, but nothing inside the computer sounds like in real life. The voices, as I mentioned, sounds a bit like extremely natural computer generated voices. They have a metallic sound to them, which makes all the characters seem even more real/virtual, depending on how you see it.
Controls & Gameplay
Being an FPS, the controls are not much to discuss. With the left mouse button you fire, and with the right mouse button you can use your disc to block incoming enemy discs, sending them flying wildy around. If your disc is out and not out of control the right mouse button calls it back. If you hold the left mouse button down you can guide the disc where you want it to go. Pressing F1 pauses the game and brings up the subroutines screen.
Subroutines are small programs you can install into your memory to upgrade your abilities or get new ones. The first one you get is Y-Amp, which allows you to jump higher. Some subroutines are armor, some are combat (modifications of the basic weapons) or utilities. You have limited space in your memory (depending on the system you’re in), so you’ll have to choose carefully. Although you can press F1 and switch between the subroutines at any time, it can be stressful when surrounded. As you progress through the game you get better versions of the subroutines. The alpha version is not very effective and takes up three slots of memory, the beta is better and takes two slots and the gold is even more effective and takes only one slot.
If you get problems with your subroutines, such as if they’re corrupted or you get one that’s not compatible, you have three procedurals at your hand. Defragment, port and disinfect.
You have three indicators at the bottom of the HUD displaying your health, energy and permissions. You need energy to use certain weapons (such as the rod and the mesh) and their mods and to transfer data from the data archives scattered around the maps. These archives contain either permissions, subroutines or e-mails/video archives. The permissions give you access to certain areas by requirements for opening doors or allow you to use objects.
The e-mails you obtain tell the background story for the game. You can find e-mails from 1982 to 2003. These can be read at any time by pressing 9.
If you ever run low on health or energy you can look for the health, energy and infinite energy patch routines. They function much like medkits.
Through the game you meet enemies like the ICPs (Intrusion Countermeasure Programs), Z-Lots (corrupted programs), Rector Scripts (scripts converting other programs to Z-lots), Resource Hogs and fCon’s DataWraiths. The resource hogs are programs that use huge amounts of resources. Ironically enough, they are often called word.exe or wordedit.exe. They use the suffusion subroutine, which is a shotgun modification of the rod primitive. If they get close to you, you’re bound to get a lot of damage, so take them out quickly. The DataWraiths are fCon’s specialized computer hackers. Their task is to take over computers from the inside. Their weapon of choice is the mesh.
You get four basic weapons throughout the game: The Disc, the rod primitive, the ball primitive and the mesh primitive. The Disc is your primary weapon, known from the movie. The rod is the handle rod from a light cycle, which can be modified in various ways. The ball is a corruption based weapon you throw. It functions somewhat similar to a grenade. The mesh is the last weapon you get, and is a blaster type weapon with a high rate of fire.
As a program, you’re updated regularly. Around the maps there are a given amount of build notes. When you pick these items up your get 2 build points added to your version number. When you complete levels you also get a given amount of build points. When you reach a new version you can upgrade your max health, energy, weapon efficiency, transfer rate and your processor. Your processing power decides how long the procedurals take to finish.
Of course, the light cycle race is included, with a new super light cycle and lots of challenging grids and useful power-ups.
The first time you start playing the game it can be a little overwhelming and disorienting and the difficulty may seem a little high, even on easy. However, the second time I played it it was much easier.
Phew…
Computer language
Throughout the game you will hear and see a lot of phrases that are taken from everyday life and twisted a little so they fit in perfectly. For instance, take the phrase: In your face, asshole! In TRON 2.0 they say: In your interface, program!. You’ll also hear the obvious You can’t hide from me, I know all the shortcuts. If you derez a civilian program it’s game over and you hear Illegal Program Termination. I could go on and on listing incredible amounts of geeky phrases, but I’d rather let you experience them yourself if you are to play the game. On the Internet a script starts that displays ads. The script obviously bypasses the spam blocker.
TRON 1.0 references
In one of my favorite worlds, you enter the old Encom mainframe from the movie. It has been in sleep mode for a long time and on arrival you meet I-No, an old program who knows everything about the system. Proudly he presents you with the system specs: EN12-82, top-of-the-line mainframe, capable of 16-bit processing, full monochromatic display support and a local storage of 128 megabytes. I challenge you to find a more robust system.
In this system you encounter the tank programs known from the movie. They’re started with a humorous build note: Tanks are read-only and indestructible. Enjoy ;)
And lastly some trivia for fans of the movie: Note what the password is in the tank script.
Conclusion
This game is one of the most successful movie licensed games I’ve ever seen, and standing just as a regular game, it’s also one of the most original ones. Every computer geek who’s into games has to play it. Its attention to detail in the programs’ names and the fact that there’s a night club called the Progress Bar is good enough reason in my eyes. Although the game felt a little difficult and disorienting the first time I started playing it, it was well worth playing on.
Score
9.2/10
3 Comments
August 3, 2008 at 3:14 am
Thanks !
January 16, 2009 at 7:41 pm
I found this in a cheap bin at Office Max and gave it a try, and I honestly wasn’t impressed. The biggest negative to me was the fact that you had to read instructions to figure out a FPS. Somehow that just doesn’t seem right: a shooter means…. you run around and shoot.
The other thing was the fact that the enemies ALWAYS seemed to hit me, and the damage was monstrous (2-3 hits and I was dead!) Whereas my weapons always seemed weak, ineffective, and prone to missing (and I’m fairly decent at shooters, if I do say so.)
I wish that block could have been sustained, but it seems like blocking with the disk would only last about .5 seconds.
I dunno, I’d prefer something like “Serious Sam” over this, personally.
August 31, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Being a huge fan of the original film, I was excited when I got TRON 2.0 as a gift back in 2004.
I thought the game was a huge amount of fun, and not just because it allowed me — a fan of the original film — to finally “go inside the computer” and have my own adventure.
The levels are gloriously artistic and extrapolate beautifully on the first film’s vision, while the language and references were balanced nicely between new technology, and computing as it existed in 1981-1982.
My only real complaint is that the game didn’t sell well enough for Disney to fund add-on packs and additional adventures. I’d love very much to take additional trips through the TRON cyberverse. Alas, one trip is all we got.
Hopefully the game(s) Disney is making for TRON 2.0 will be as good — if not better — than this one.