I wasn’t originally planning on writing another ‘review’ of Tremulous after my first post about it, but I’ve been playing a bit over the last couple of weeks, and wanted to put some thoughts down on paper.

The Good
Tremulous is great fun. I love being an alien - it’s such a different way of doing things, although it takes some getting used to. Plus, I think they’ve done a fantastic job of not giving either species an overall advantage, without falling into the trap of giving exact opposites to each side.
The graphics are great, and the movement is cool - the aliens move _so_ quickly it’s unbelievable. The weapons for the humans are cool, but the aliens have some funky moves too Oh, and the alien defensive buildings are pretty cool, I reckon.
It’s so much easier to get a game online with T too; lots of servers, not so many players. Which is great. Oh, and did I mention that it’s 100% Free?

The Bad
There are a few annoyances I’ve found:

• The chat messages disappear too quickly from the screen
• There is no easy way to organise attacks, and coordination is particularly important for the aliens
• The jetpack gives a huge advantage - it’s very hard to kill someone flying, and the fuel supply lasts for ages
• There is no element on ‘Experience Points’ which would enable team shuffling based on experience (at least, that I’ve found).
• Unbalanced teams, in my experience, quickly make things _very_ unbalanced. A few extra frags quickly leads to better weapons, and suddenly the weaker team is struggling to get further up the ’stage’ scale. This should probably be resolved by shuffling as in the point above.

The Ugly
Man - those aliens are scary buggers. If they catch you unawares they scare the life out of you!

Conclusion
Tremulous is still a great game. I’ll still be playing it for a while. The learning curve, particularly for aliens, is quite steep, but worth it. If you haven’t given it a go, then you should…..

mrBen