Tryst Demo

The real-time strategy genre is very unusual, because one can easily come up with a variety of new ideas to make the experience more fun and enjoyable for the players. However, that is not enough to attract a crowd, because you have to convince a few million players to leave StarCraft for a while and see whether they enjoy your game more than that. As such, you really need to come up with something great, otherwise no one is going to pay attention.

Tryst takes a shot at Blizzard’s giant and it actually declares itself a competitive RTS, meaning that it should play very similarly to StarCraft, with a few twists. Obviously, you ought to expect fast-paced gameplay mechanics and a lot of micromanagement, because that is how competitive RTS matches are played. Unfortunately, Tryst forgets to make the experience enjoyable as well, which is a severe mistake nowadays.

To begin with, you should know that the game also comes with a single player component and a campaign, in order to explain the universe in which the action takes place. As such, everything seems to revolve around the war between humans and a mysterious alien race called Zali, while the entire action takes place sometime in the future, where technology is significantly more advanced than today.

The most advertised feature of the game seems to be the possibility to customize units in a variety of ways, which should make it that much easier to experience a different challenge with almost every match. However, these customization options are not what you would expect and you usually just get to increase certain stats a little bit, which doesn’t have too much of an impact on the gameplay as a whole.

The game may say that it tries to innovate the genre and bring a lot of new features to the players, but for a title that’s supposedly original and open-minded, it looks an awful lot like StarCraft in many regards. The visual quality is subpar as well, especially when you consider the year of release. Not much praise can be bestowed on the sound quality either, because the voice acting is particularly terrible and it often breaks the immersion.

In the end, Tryst had the chance to bring at least a few improvements to the genre and make it slightly better, but not even that worked out as planned. Instead, the game has balancing issues, the graphics are poor, and the overall customization features are badly implemented, not to mention boring.