Tribes Ascend is not like other first-person shooters. Or you can trek up to the top of the very highest hill you can see, take a brief peek at the scene through your binoculars and dive down, gaining maximum velocity before soaring to incredible heights on a full energy reserve. You can eke out the tiny boosts, throttling on and off to skip across a studded landscape, gathering a little more juice from each lump. Learning how to land from a fall, when to jam the jetpack button as hard as you can, and when to just sit back and let gravity do the work is an endless learning curve. Little speedbumps litter almost every concourse, while the long freeways are a haven for zooming speedsters but a death-zone if you're trying to pick up pace.

Cresting a hill and landing snugly on the downside is one thing, but the contours of the game's maps are much more complex than that. Skiing is its own game, one where the fundamentals are easy to grasp but new techniques and tricks pop up constantly. It's also the first to be developed by Hi-Rez Studios. The series highpoint is generally thought to be 2001's Tribes 2, which Tribes Ascend is a direct sequel to. The jetpack is for the inclines, the idea being that you can essentially keep accelerating as long as you only ski downhill or on flats. Skiing is the ability to glide without friction over the landscape, meaning that when engaged, you accelerate going downhill and maintain speed over flat surfaces. Tribes Ascend realises them magnificently. The Tribes series dates back to 1999's Starsiege Tribes, which introduced the interlocking mechanics of jetpacks and skiing. And Tribes Ascend is, by more than 300kmhh, the most exciting first-person shooter I've played in years. It eschews single-player completely, and in truth only one of its four game modes really matters.

This is in some respects an unusual game: a top-tier competitive FPS launching under a free-to-play payment model with one key (structural) feature still not fully implemented. The FPS genre is where Tribes Ascend fits, but preconceptions about that term should be forgotten. And does anyone want to predict when the final shot will be fired in Team Fortress 2? Counter-Strike is regarded by many of its adherents as the only serious competitive shooter to this day. Fire a nailgun at a crowd and you'll hit someone who still swears Quake is the finest first-person shooter ever made.

Tribes ascend download