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Having purposely kept away from real-time strategy games after an unhealthy period with Age of Empires II over a decade ago, I was unsure what crazy changes had taken place in the genre.  What insane new systems had evolved and how would I cope with them?  If Tryst is any indication, not too much has changed in all that time, though Tryst tries really hard to inject some new ideas.  Even adding on a few good-intention bonus points, Tryst is still a bland sci-fi entry in a genre that could really use some juicing up.

Tryst’s attempt at revolutionary mechanics mainly applies to the Zali – the alien race battling against the humans.  So, if you choose to play as the humans you’ll be missing out on most of the new ideas.  The Zali are special because they can merge multiple units into more powerful soldiers and vehicles once you’ve leveled up enough of your structures to gain this ability.

Imagine that instead of clicking on barracks to build a new special soldier you’ve unlocked, you now must create two low-level soldiers and then click them again to combine them into a more powerful form.  That’s right – the innovative Zali mechanic turns out to be the addition of even more clicks when there are already plenty of things to be clicking and hot-keying. It’s a decent theory to try out, but sadly isn’t particularly interesting or fun once put into practice.

The sequence of building and leveling up your structures as a Zali is also a bit different than the usual since you can pick a path of preservation, strife, or silence which will affect your units’ available skills.  This forces you to consider which type of strategy you will adopt heading into a game – more defensive, well-rounded, etc.  These big base-level differences make it particularly difficult to switch between humans using traditional unit improvements and the Zali with their unusual new sequence that gains nothing in the end.

It would be nice if the game gave you a good way to learn the unique Zali mechanics, but unfortunately Tryst doesn’t provide such a thing. Like many multiplayer focused games, there’s a single player campaign that should act as a training ground for the multiplayer experience.  Tryst’s campaign tries to teach you the game’s systems by slowly increasing the needed skills required to complete each mission and forcing you to slowly understand each aspect of the game.  Ideally this would lead you on a track to learn all of the skill trees, hot-keys, and menus in the game -- except there’s no actual training in these levels.

You are basically required to realize what the campaign’s goal is, wonder how the heck you would do such a thing, and then watch a voiced-over help video to learn how to operate the game.  This does work, but certainly won’t train an RTS amateur without a lot of work, and for a lapsed player (like me) I felt like I was going to class instead of doing something fun.  That was OK since I expected to hit the books a little to get back in the swing of things and I was motivated to do so, but anyone just casually trying out the game is certain to give up quickly. 

The missions also focus on the human side – the force most like every other RTS out there that requires less learning.  More attention should have been given to teaching the unusual Zali strategies than spending time instructing on the plain old humans.  Not normal humans either, but very annoying humans.  The dialog between heavily accented Eastern Euros and other stereotypes rankles with its trite subject matter and middle-school theatre quality acting.  You can’t skip through the story bits either should you have to repeat any portion of a mission where voiceovers are present.  There is one instance where I’m pretty sure a key female character’s voice is delivered by a completely different actor than the rest of her lines.  Suffering through the story was bad enough, but all of those factors made it unbearable.

Restoring a saved game in the single player was also a pretty dodgy experience, often getting me stuck in a loading screen that could only be resolved by restarting the game.  I even had an instance when every saved game I had disappeared, requiring me to restart the mission I was in the middle of (luckily, the game remembered which missions I had already completed). If you’re familiar at all with RTS games, spend your time just watching the help videos and then diving in to the multiplayer against the computer to practice.

You might as well get used to playing with and against the CPU too, since the lobby for Tryst is filled with space-tumbleweeds and often boots you out with vague error messages. If you make it through the single player campaign, you will be used to getting error messages, with all manner of things scrolling across the screen about missing sound effects and other unnoticed problems that are being communicated back to the developer.  Should you make it through all of these barriers and get into a human v. human multiplayer session or against the computer, you are in for a mildly entertaining battle!

My first beef with the multiplayer is the lack of one-on-one options.  At first there were no maps to facilitate a 2-person match, but one was just recently added – possibly to allow the twos of people in the lobby to actually be able to play against each other. Playing with a partner against other teams can be a fun way to play an RTS, but Tryst has something against those who want to avoid the challenges of teamwork and just fight out who is the better player.

The other problem with the maps, be they 2 v. 2, 3 v. 3, or 4 v. 4, is that they are completely bland.  Each is set in a different environment, but they are the same old places – swamp, lava, water, industrial, etc. – and have a real feeling of sterile optimized focus group gameplay. The levels do have environmental hazards, a unique trait of Tyst that makes things a bit interesting.  Should you go and capture an ore extractor in a lava field despite the reality that you will lose a few units doing so? Having to make these decisions is the one notable part of the map designs, while everything else is completely forgettable.

Beyond selecting which units to build (and morph together for the Zali), you also have the ability to upgrade each unit type to enhance them in a direction to fit your strategy or play style.  This is a pretty key element of the game – if you just amass tons of troops without devising an enhancement strategy, they will end up being meat targets for your opponents who have attack and defensive bonuses to wallop your weaklings.  Balancing troop creation, building construction, offensive maneuvers, and these unit power ups all become part of the strategy like any well-designed RTS.  There really is nothing to beef about with the skill trees, unit build-ups, and other strategizing in the game, but there’s just nothing extraordinary other than the upgrade system either – and I’d personally rather have a variety of units than the option to stick weapons onto a small selection of troops and ships.

It all comes down to what you’ve been wanting out of your RTS.  If you play a ton of these games and are just dying to find anything new even if it’s deep in the game’s mechanics, then Tryst might be an interesting diversion for you. If you only want to take the time to master games that plenty of others are playing and you’ll stick with for months or years – stay away.  After spending more time than I really wanted to with Tryst, I’m certainly far from mastering its mechanics but don’t have any desire to continue down that road.  There is no real draw to Tryst for the majority of the population, so it’s probably best to just return to your regularly scheduled Starcraft II play sessions.