Tribes 2 is a first person shooter set in the 40th century. Building upon the award-winning Starsiege Tribes, Tribes 2 inserts you into breathtaking worlds where brainpower and teamwork are the only true keys to survival. Tribes 2 features all the great things that the original had. Each bit has been enhanced and expanded. The most obvious difference between Tribes and Tribes 2 is the new graphics engine in the sequel, which was completely reworked to take advantage of hardware acceleration and more powerful PCs. In the game, players select from a group of four tribes: Blood Eagles, Diamond Sword, Harbingers of Phoenix, and The Starwolf. There is also a 5th tribe called the Bioderms - genetically made monsters that are looking to be the sole dominant species. They are the wildcard Tribe and look like they will kill the others permanently if they can’t put their own differences aside. Once a character is created and a tribe selected, you can start your online experience :) The standard mode of play in a game like Tribes 2 is to run around, shooting everything that moves until the character is killed. Once their character is dead, players wait for it to respawn, and then charge off again. There are so many players in a game and the maps are so open, many of the objectives are impossible if players don't cooperate. Tribes 2 also includes bots, but I strongly recommend that you play against real players online because the AI on the bots in the game is not much, in addition bots takes plenty of CPU power:( Graphics are nice, except for the missing textures. Sometimes you have a gun in your hand but it looks like a jumpled mess, or there are strips in the ground that have no textures, and water clips into the land, well maybe some patch already fixed that - honestly I didn't install all patches yet. All visual options including the advanced shadowing and gorgeous sky effects are scalable, allowing users to tailor Tribes 2 for the best performance or the best eye candy. Tribes 2 utilizes new V12 graphics engine that includes full support for OpenGL and Direct3D at resolutions ranging from 640x480 all the way up to 1600x1200, though the graphics have been optimized for OpenGL instead of Glide - something sure to bother those players who bought 3dfx boards for Tribes. Simply, if you do have a high-end system, the game looks VERY good. For an example,with Pentium 4 1.5GHz/GeForce2 Ultra you can expect a very smooth frame rate at 1024x768 with maximum detail turned on :P However, if you don't want to be very disapointed, rather even don't try to play it on an old Celeron or Pentium with less than 500Mhz. The audio portion of the game was well done, with battles sounds being well-emulated. The sounds in Tribes 2 are refined versions of what we heard in Tribes. Each weapon sound effect fits its equipment well and is agreeable enough that you won't mind hearing it repeatedly.The game also includes a custom soundtrack, an unsurprising mix of electronic and guitar that you'll probably turn down before long :) Tribes 2 is a very well created game, the weapons are varied, the vehicles increase destruction, and the game play is intense. If you like team warfare and love online gaming then this game was custom made for you.