Tabula Rasa Preview

Posted on August 17th, 2007 at 8:22pm by Version 2.0

You left your home far behind and travelled across the galaxy for one reason: to defeat the Bane. Now, fighting on the front lines of an epic galactic war, your coalition of rebel soldiers is the last line of defence against an implacable alien foe hungry for universal conquest.

Combining the action of a third person shooter and the immersion of a role-playing game, Tabula Rasa takes you on an intergalactic adventure where any soldier has the ability to significantly impact the course of battle. Can you turn the tide of war against the Bane?

You start Tabula Rasa as a bit of a non entity. There is no obvious path carved out for you to follow.
Most games these days have a character creation screen. But where Tab Raps differs from all the others is the choice of profession or the lack of it. When you first create your character they are classed as a rookie soldier. They are not linked to any group. So you cannot choose to be a medic or Spy or explosives expert from creation. As you progress through the game you will of course earn experience and level up. Each time you level to a certain point, about every 5 levels you get the choice to move your career path along. So when you finally reach the higher levels then and only then will you be a fully-fledged...

The game starts with a series of pretty quick but informal tutorials, which unfortunately you cannot detour round. As I said before, they are fairly quick and all are pretty painless. From the basics of movement A, S, D, W to the more advanced move of C for Crouch. You then move on to clearing a path to the nearest checkpoint/base. This is where you will first get your chance to kill something. The Thing in question being the dreaded Bane, a ruthless, unemotional, killing force that is hell bent on wiping out the human race. Well the human race has you and a... pistol to start with. You may feel a little out gunned but as the bodies pile up you can search through Bane carcass on the look out for weaponry and salvageable bits.

Once you have helped your group reach the first base, hopefully with not that many respawn visits; you will be given more missions. The most important being find and learn how to use LOGOS. LOGOS are just a fancy new tagline for "Special Powers" or "Skills". The first one you find is Lightning Electricity. No that doesn't mean it’s a Neon LOGO. It means you can now fire Lightning from your fingers a'la the emperor from Star Wars. LOGOS along with more normal sounding attributes are all upgradeable when you level up. You get allocated a certain amount of points to use as you wish. This helps when getting to a level where you can choose a career path.

The Power of LOGOS in your hand you are now ready to be teleported to the next world. Upon arriving you will be given numerous tasks to do by numerous people. This was the most challenging part of the game for me! There is no reference pointer on the map to track back to a certain person. The only time you know you are near them is a bright orange mobile phone symbol floating over their heads.

Tabula Rasa looks set to be a winner with most gamers. There are a few glitchy bits that hopefully will be ironed out by the time the game is sent for retail. These include at present getting stuck in the world on pointless areas. "Help, I’m stuck on a ramp" "Help I'm stuck in a field" There is no reason to it luckily you can type /stuck and jump 2ft to the right. Then there is my biggest problem, this isn't with the game itself, it’s with the NCLauncher. I lost count of the amount of times it has messed me around with patch errors and downloading continuous content. This will be a big problem if the masses waiting to purchase this game have the same errors I keep getting.

The game itself if available to launch without NCLauncher would be a score of 9 out of 10 easy.

If I had to score it with the NCLauncher the score would plummet like a Bane Predator after heavy fire, crashing in at 5 out of 10. Lucky this is just a preview and they have time to fix it! Isn't it?