If the first StarCraft and WarCraft 3 had a child it would probably be Tryst. With a mix of Sci-Fi and hero units the game feels like a throwback to years ago when this is pretty much what everyone was expecting in the form of a StarCraft sequel. Problems seem to arise while Tryst is paying homage to its roots as an RTS instead of possibly looking at some of the different and interesting places the genre has gone in these last ten years.
Aside from the normal RTS base building tropes that everyone is used to, setting up the economy, and making sure that you have build orders correct, Tryst adds perks to units as they spawn. This is called the A.R.M system and gives each game a feeling that it could go one way or another. Tryst might try and sell this a little hard, saying each choice as to what to equip on a given type of unit comes with a drawback as well as the bonus (the drawback seems to be not getting the other bonus as well), but it sort of seems like the thing that advanced play would just have a set spec for each unit instead of each one being useful.
Although it is hard to gauge advanced play as the handful of times that I checked online there were a max of two games going. On top of that, the game forces players to connect to the company’s servers before they battle it out online, something that seems a little disappointing considering that most of the best times I have ever had playing an RTS was only against a close friend and not some random people scattered throughout the world.
Tryst also seems to throw the worst kind of missions thinkable at the player, where there are simply no base building options throughout the level. It might be commonplace for most strategy games to require this mission once or twice during the course of an entire campaign as it goes a long way to making the player feel underpowered and forcing them to learn the nuances of unit types, it seems like Tryst actively abuses that right early and often by sends players out with what feels like entirely too few units with no means of adding more for the majority of levels.
It isn’t even that Tryst feels like it is a bad game, it just feels dated. If this had come out directly after Warcraft 3 it would have probably torn up the world with what it was doing, and had people stop longing for the next decade for Starcraft 2. That makes it all the more depressing that it comes off as a hard game to recommend to anyone who isn’t a diehard fan of the genre, and even they might find it lacking in many of the areas it shouldn’t be.
Not As Good As: Company of Heroes
Also Try: StarCraft 2
Wait For It: Cheats
By: Dan Gillman
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