Combat in Tabula Rasa is one of the game’s most compelling features. Characters can wield many types of weapons including pistols, machine guns, rifles, and other exotic weaponry. Regardless of your weapon of choice combat is fast-paced which has the player not only trying to make effective use of their Logos abilities but also forcing them to think strategically in where their character is fighting from. The game has a cover mechanic that makes it so a character behind sandbags, low walls, or other objects receives less damage from ranged attacks depending on the quality of the cover. This means that a smart player will examine where the enemy is, try to take cover nearby, and engage the enemy from there to minimize damage taken while letting the Bane have it.
Though the third-person combat looks reflex-heavy, the actual gameplay is more of a thinking man’s shooter. There is a crosshair in the middle of the player’s screen that is intended more as a selection reticule than anything else, and placing it over an enemy or object makes that your current target. Players can then lock the current target, so that as long as it remains on the screen they don’t need to worry about aiming at all. In addition to taking cover to reduce damage taken, players can crouch to minimize their profile, taking less damage from ranged attacks while at the same time doubling the damage of any melee hits they take. There is hardly a more one-sided fight in Tabula Rasa than watching a player engage an enemy at their weapon’s maximum range while they are crouched behind cover, and it is that strategic gameplay that really defines the combat as a whole.
The universe is centered on war and battle, which is manifested through the neutral bases and strongholds found in every zone. While some bases will always be controlled by friendly forces, the neutral ones are nearly constantly under siege by Bane forces. Left unchecked, the bases will fall and the Bane will take up defensive positions inside and make the base inaccessible until players take it back by force. Most of these bases fulfill the needed role as places where players rearm and repair, as they are often great stopping points between the main human bases. This means that it is a genuine inconvenience for players operating nearby when these bases are Bane controlled, and thusly are never controlled by the enemy for too long and is only a matter of time before enough players arrive to clean the place out.
Past the combat oriented gameplay the title is made up of mostly conventional MMO mechanics. MMO veterans will have little trouble figuring out how to use the quest log to see details on their missions, and of how to use the waypoint pads to instantly travel from one pad to any other located pad in the zone. The ten key hotbar at the bottom of the screen is split in two, with one through five uses solely for weapons and six through ten used for abilities. While the ability tray can be cycled through multiple bars the weapons tray cannot, which makes life complicated when a player has a healing disc, an armor repair tool, and a crafting tool leaving only two slots free for guns. Since weapons can only deal damage in one of many types including physical, laser, etc., and some enemies are resistant or immune to some types of damage, a five slot limitation can often be a liability.
Finally, the game suffers from a few elements of its gameplay that are either bug-ridden or seem unfinished to the point of being broken. The crafting system can be hard to jump into at first, and spending the effort to do so isn’t very rewarding as it revolves around using one-time use schematics. This means that sure you can get schematics to craft an item, but as soon as you craft it the only way you can make another is by acquiring another schematic. Weapon modifications are handled the same way, which makes sense except for that modifications can only be used on completely unmodified items. Player-modified items with their single modifications pale in their usefulness with how often quest rewards give players items that have two or more powerful modifications already in place.
“Player versus player” combat is intended to be functional in the game, but seems to really have taken a back seat to the more “player versus environment” oriented gameplay. Players can duel one another to see who reigns supreme, and guilds can declare upon creation for themselves to be a PvP guild and battle other PvP guilds on sight. In either case little is done to explain the how-to’s or even the why’s to the PvP combat, as the combat is not tracked and there are no rewards in participating in it. Perhaps in the future the PvP aspect will be more fleshed out or get a rewards system, but in the meantime the feature as a whole feels tacked on at best.
Tabula Rasa is a beautiful game, both in its strong art direction to its impressive use of sound effects and musical score. The level of detail on the character models is fantastic, from the humanoid forms down to the menacing Thrax and other Bane races, and the combat animations and special effects tend to really define the action taking place on the screen. Lighting and shadowing is also used to great effect, such as the shadows cast by a tree branch overhead or the brief illumination caused by an enemy exploding in a bright Logos-powered flash. The sounds of rifles firing and the gurgling Thrax taking those shells bring a visceral punch to the combat, and while back in the relative peace of a human base a quest giver often will have at least a few lines of voice work describing the mission they have at hand.
Tabula Rasa has some flaws, but ultimately the deep and engaging combat is what makes the title shine. Still, the average if not flawed gameplay that makes up the rest of the title is worrisome, and even if it doesn’t represent the majority of what most players will be interested it does detract from the experience as a whole. Nevertheless players will spend most of their time happily trading fire with hostile aliens in combat that rewards the strategic player, a welcome breath of fresh air in a genre that could use a good shakeup.
