I downloaded the demo of the game Tron 2.0, last night. Cue rant! Why must every game made these days be a bloody First Person Shooter? Sure, Tron also has a nod, a decapitated nod, to the light-cycle, but where's the tank-driving? Where's the flying of one of those leggy thingies? How about a subgame involving messing with circuitry a-la Purple Saturn Day's? No wait, I've got a better idea! Let's make it exactly the same as Quake, only with shitty graphics that look like a movie from the 80's!
The light-cycles bit is almost fun, but then they go and shove tall buildings on the grid so that you can't see where you're about to turn. If I want a 50% chance of losing every few minutes, I'll toss a coin. That could perhaps be redeemed if they'd bound the FPS 'lean left' and 'lean right' keys to be 'camera from the right' and 'camera from the left' as temporary things, enabling you to see around the corner before it's an issue, but they didn't, and it's crappy and annoying. I'd rather play a light-cycles game where the cycles are just single pixels, and the view is top-down. It may look crappy, but it's a lot more fun.
The FPS part, too, was almost fun. They have you wielding the Tron disc, with which you can deflect other disc attacks, as well as throwing it, arcing it, and bouncing it off walls. Supposedly. That's completely ruined, however, by the enemies often using non-disc weapons (such that you can't deflect them, and such that trying to deflect anything is liable to get you killed and is thus pointless), and by the disc's bouncing back, rather than proper angle-of-incidence behaviour, half the time. And by the arcing capability being pretty much imperceptible. In effect, it becomes the crappy energy pistol from Unreal 2. The game would be an order of magnitude more fun if the disc were implemented properly, and the viewpoint were made third-person in the style of MDK or Tomb Raider. That way, dodging and deflection would be feasible and visually appealing, and the game actually would be different. Though I'd still be annoyed by the lack of usable tanks and flying things.
As it is, the demo is more than enough. I find it difficult to imagine anyone playing the demo and going on to purchase the full game.
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