This is the best XCOM game by far, I think. Enemy Within was an incredibly fleshed-out and complete experience and this manages to outdo it pretty handily. I actually have so few issues with this game that I think I can list them all right here.

-Balancing is still a minor issue - the tier 2 tech swords are way better than tier 3 because too many ADVENT units are immune to the fire damage status effect and almost nothing is immune to the shock damage effect. Luckily, the balancing is mostly bad in intuitive ways, it doesn't really trick you. If something is bad, you'll notice right away from its description most of the time.

-The Chosen Assassin is much more threatening than the other two, which is weird because she's usually encountered first, as far as I can tell. Her bonus movement turns, turn interrupts and invisibility affect the action point economy way more than the other two do. The Warlock tends to stand out in the open and let himself get bullied to death, and the Hunter has to spend a turn of uninterrupted line of sight doing nothing in order to deal damage, so in practice he just never deals damage. Maybe this is different on Commander difficulty and above but I don't know. Turn economy tends to matter more on higher difficulties so I suspect the difficulty variance might be even worse.

-Enemy Unknown/Within were a lot more consistent with the turn/action economy and the game broke its own rules a lot less. It wasn't common for a unit to do a ton of stuff in one turn. In XCOM 2, every viable build is based around stretching the turn economy to its limits. The result is pistol Sharpshooters and sword-focused Rangers being absolutely busted.

-I miss MECs. I don't like SPARKs at all. I know MECs were a little busted in Enemy Within but frankly given that everything is busted now, I think they'd fit in just fine.

-Kinda my fault, but I unlocked Psi soldiers so late I could only use them on the final mission. Shame, because they seem incredibly fun and strong.

-Firaxis has still never hired a writer.

That's it. This game rules. High water mark for turn-based tactics games for me. I hope an XCOM 3 is still in the cards.

This thing has the BeamNG.drive problem for me - the core mechanics are incredibly fun to play with, but there's almost no game in here to encourage you to get the most out of the mechanics. I completed every challenge in a night, and that was a really fun night! But after that, I went looking for what else the game had to offer me, and it wasn't much. There's no real career mode, just a sandbox mode with really vague objectives that are too abstracted to give me a sense of place and progression like, I dunno, My Summer Car or Death Stranding or something. A set of longer mini-campaigns that are structured more like the challenges are, or a more complex management-heavy career mode, would do a lot to keep me playing. As it is, this is more of a toy than a game.

Still, though, I cannot stress this enough - the mud physics are ENTRANCING. I will 100% pick this back up for a couple hours every few months just to see them again.

I put in three hours of the open playtest today, and it's wonderful. Even in this unfinished state that kept timing me out from the server, this is an incredibly fun game. I want to live in a world where I will be able to put as many hours into this game as I did with Ascend back when I was in high school.

Unfortunately, I don't think that world is this one. I think this game is doomed to unprofitability and shutdown, and I think that any games that try to resurrect the spirit of Tribes 2 (I'm looking at you, Midair 2,) are also inherently doomed to failure. I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done about that.

Tribes' formula saddles the game with both a high skill floor and an absurdly high skill ceiling. It's harder to pick up than most FPS games, and high-level players are untouchable. Brand-new players will get blue-plate-special'd from a kilometer away by a dude zipping around at 250 kph with a light spinfusor, and those brand new players might not even recognize incredible shots like that for what they are - coming from any other FPS, dying that way just feels like your opponent is cheating. We all know full well that when casual new players have a first experience with a game like that, they drop it, and they tell their friends not to bother.

Tribes: Ascend tried to mitigate this in a few small ways, adding a slow out-of-combat health regen (which, for the record, I don't think was too offensive of a change), the jetpacks gave you some forward momentum instead of purely upwards momentum, and, more importantly, making the easier-to-use weapons a lot stronger. Of course, this means they just buffed hitscan weapons, because spinfusors are pretty hard to use! It could be really discouraging for a new player to realize that the only way to deal reliable damage is to land rocket launcher hits from 200 meters away.

You know what happened if you were there - the hitscan buffs, especially with regards to the sniper rifle, were very offensive to the core playerbase. Changes like that go against the spirit of Tribes! The skill and elegance of projectile weapons and momentum inheritance is the entire point of Tribes!

And now HiRez was stuck between a rock and a hard place - either stick with the decisions they had made and alienate their core audience for the sake of being more accessible to newcomers, or roll the changes back to the way things were in T2 and keep the hardcore players happy - while dooming this low-budget F2P game to an extreme niche that couldn't possibly pay for the game's maintenance.

HiRez tried both options, sticking to their guns for quite a long time before finally nerfing the most egregious hitscan weapons a couple years later. Neither worked, and Ascend shut down.

Tribes 3 doesn't have powerful, easy-to-use weapons. It doesn't have health regen, instead having a kind of slow heal-over-time health kit that players drop on death (though Redditors seem to hate this, too.) The inheritance system is actually fine-tunable in the options menu, letting your spinfusors handle precisely the way you like. Tribes 3 feels like a love letter to the psychotically hardcore fans that kept Ascend alive so long past its expiration date. But I don't know if those same darling psychos will be enough of a revenue stream to keep this game alive. I have a sinking feeling they won't.

Tribes is fun as fuck. It's fun to hit the edges of hills juuuust right and get a sick speed boost. It's fun to shoot aimlessly at the horizon and get a kill from across the entire map ten seconds later. I think a LOT of people would find Tribes fun if they gave it a chance. But due to twenty years of accumulated design, a lot of which wasn't even intentional, the expectations thrust upon Tribes mean it's an unwelcoming game to get into, and a downright hostile experience for people more familiar with more standard shooters. I think this game is doomed to be unprofitable to run.

If you like weird games about going real fast, please give this one a shot. I promise it is worth the learning curve. Tribes doesn't feel like anything else - except maybe SSX, but with rocket launchers. And if you do give it a try, please keep playing it, for as long as you find it fun to play. I want to give this thing as much of a chance at survival as possible.