Ant’s Rant: Tron Evolution

If you’ve been following me or know me, you know I’m a huge fan of the Tron series. From the classic film’s trip into the computer world, to the Tron: Ghost in the Machine comic’s trip back to fight the resurrected MCP, to Tron 2.0’s battle to take down Encom’s rival fCon and save Alan Bradley (Kevin Flynn’s best friend), to the new Legacy series’ (Betrayal, Evolution, and Legacy) foray into The Grid to highlight the story of CLU and the ISOs, I’ve been hooked on these stories in the digital world. It’s all been presented extremely well so far. Will Tron Evolution faithfully bring you into The Grid and keep you derezzing more and more programs, or will it be end of line for further Tron games?

Take a game like Prince of Persia, put it in a universe like Tron, throw a multiplayer mode into it that is more about leveling up your single player character than actually having a decent online mode, and you get Evolution. It has parkour and climbing like the most recent Prince of Persia game meets something like a lite version of Assassin’s Creed, and a fairly simple combat scheme. What it doesn’t have are properly designed levels to really make good use of the agility-based gameplay or a camera that will save you from derezzing. Playing the game itself was a test of tolerance. It wanted to see just how many times you could tolerate dying and having to start sections over again ad nauseum. It wanted to see if you could ever possibly see it through to the end. The level design gets so atrocious at times that if you aren’t doing exactly what the game wants you to do, you die. The parkour in the game is so sensitive that if you’re leaning your thumb at all in the wrong direction, you’ll see yourself jumping to your death. The camera is so off that if you try to improvise with your movement too much, the camera gets stuck in corners or stuck in a scripted wide angle and you end up dead. Even the disorientation from a shift in camera position could end up causing you to jump in a completely wrong direction which leads in death. I swear to you all, there have been some segments that weren’t even meant to be challenging that took me well over 20 tries to complete.

The main reason I played through to the end is because I really wanted to experience the story. Having read Tron: Betrayal, which deals with Flynn’s creation of The Grid, the birth of the ISOs, and CLU’s growing resentment of Flynn, I wanted to see what happens from then up until Tron: Legacy. The Betrayal comic shows us that CLU’s rivalry with Flynn starts with his confliction over Flynn’s responsibilities in the Real World as opposed to CLU’s total devotion to The Grid. Once the ISOs spontaneously start manifesting, CLU must obey Flynn’s instructions to allow them to live freely within The Grid so that they can learn more about this new type of data, which is completely random and without a real creator. No user to program them, no program to have been repurposed from, the ISOs just spawned randomly and have no real restrictions to set purposes and skills like the rest of the programs in The Grid. CLU, being tasked to maintain a perfect system, doesn’t know what to do with the ISOs.

The story continues in Tron Evolution. CLU allows the ISOs to create their own city, named Arjia City, and forms an alliance with them. A new virus shows up, corrupting all data it comes in contact, called Abraxas. During the alliance ceremony between ISOs and Basics (another name for Programs), the Abraxas virus kills one of the leaders of the ISOs and Kevin Flynn gets lost in the chaos. In order to defeat the Abraxas virus you need to get the help of an ISO named Quorra (the hotty from Legacy) in order to get further help from the ISO leader named Radia. During your fight against the corruption, you and Quorra witness CLU’s betrayal of Tron and Flynn. Believing them both to be dead, and overhearing CLU talking about his plans to eradicate the ISOs, you go to Radia for help. CLU’s new army of repurposed programs begin a full-scale assault on Arjia City, destroying the End of Line club (which David Bowie-like character, Zuse, relocates to Tron City in time for Legacy) in the process. After the all but complete annihilation the ISOs, your character and Quorra go after Abraxas and then proceed to go after CLU. Leaving you distracted with the fight with Abraxas and CLU’s elites, the Black Guard, CLU gets away nearly killing Quorra in the process. Abraxas, now completely insane, destroys CLU’s flagship in his death throes, resulting in your death and Quorra’s being rescued and carried off by Flynn. The rest is covered by Tron Legacy.

The story itself is decent. It does a good job of tying the Betrayal comic into the Legacy film. What it doesn’t do is what the developers said it’d do. The developers claimed it’d bridge the gap between the two Tron films. There was basically nothing in this game that had anything to do with the original Tron. The whole plot involving the Abraxas virus could’ve been left out as well, since it wasn’t referred to anywhere else but in this game (as if it never happened). Quorra being saved by Flynn, and the ISO genocide were about the only parts of this story that were in Legacy, and the creation of Arjia City was in Betrayal. The story held up but, but who cares about a story if the gameplay is so painful that most can’t endure it for more than one short sitting?

The controls and the camera are ultimately what killed this game. Even the lightcycle controls weren’t good. It was too fast and too twitchy. In multiplayer at least you get the classic 90 degree quick-turns like in the original Tron, but in single player it was just a fast paced test in crashing and derezzing. It took me about 2 weeks to get through a game that could’ve taken me a couple nights if I could sit through it. I wouldn’t recommend buying this game to anyone. Even the most hardcore Tron fans should just rent this game if they really want to experience the story in full. I’d much rather have had all this in comic book form, or hell, even have it covered in the upcoming Tron: Uprising animated series. Avoid this game. Try if you dare. I really don’t have much else to say about it.