Battlecruiser Millennium Attempts to Reach for the Stars but Ultimately Only Reaches the Top of the Ladder
After starting the game, players will be given the option of playing an "Instant Action" scenario, an advanced campaign, or a roam campaign. The scenarios are self-contained missions that range from battles between starships to ground-based assaults. They are a good way for players to try out the various aspects of the game without first creating an in-game persona. The campaign games are the heart of Battlecruiser Millennium. Players select from 12 different races, 13 castes (these are akin to character classes from RPGs and include such roles as explorers, scientists, and mercenaries), and six careers. The career choice affects the player's primary duties, be it to command starships, fly fighters, or fight it out as a foot soldier. Your choices at this stage will have an impact on how the residents of the game's universe treat you. Play a paramedic and you can pretty much go where you want without any trouble. Play as an assassin, though, and don't expect to see a welcome map at every starbase. The roam campaign allows the player to do pretty much anything, from staying at home defending a base to going into the universe looking for trouble. The advanced campaign will actually provide a series of missions to the player. The player can choose to pursue these missions and be awarded with experience upon their completion, or to ignore them and pursue other interests. Should the player pass on a mission, it will continue to resolve itself, so players are not forced to complete a mission in order to be presented with a new one.
All of the freedom of choice and diversity of gameplay in Battlecruiser Millennium comes at the cost of complexity. This is not one of those games that you can jump right in and begin playing. Starship management is very complex, with a dizzying array of controls and readouts available to players. Players will need to learn the meaning of, and become familiar with, a plethora of system acronyms from ASD to WHI. The great majority of these acronyms are specific to the game, so a solid background in sim game play will not be much help in understanding the game's many systems. The game's learning curve is made even steeper by the lack of a good in-game tutorial. The game provides training scenarios, but these just dump the player into enemy free environments without any guidance or instruction on anything. An HTML file is included which provides some guidance to a few of the instant action missions, but the help is pretty basic and not always easy to follow. The game does come with a thick manual, but it is almost written as a reference for someone who is already familiar with the game, contains only two screen illustrations, and is missing an index.
Battlecruiser Millennium's execution of it's scope also makes it a textbook example of the "jack of all trades, master of none" syndrome. The individual components of the game would not stand too well on their own. For one thing, space combat just doesn't seem as exciting in Battlecruiser Millennium as it does in other space combat sims, perhaps because the player often has to spend much of the time changing settings on a multitude of cascading menus which are hindered by a bad interface. Also, no doubt in order to keep the game's complexity from getting completely out of control, every ship has the same displays and control layouts. The only real difference between them lies in whether a certain weapon is resent or not. Thus, despite the availability of a number of them, the ships classes do not have much of their own individual character.
The first person shooter aspect of the game is also tacky and poor. Unimpressive weapons, abysmal sounds, poor control, and lackluster enemy AI will probably have most players avoiding this aspect of the game when they can. While it might be asking too much of the game to expect it to compete with the first-person shooters available today, this component of the game reeks of being tacked on. As it stands, its awful and doesn't feel like an integral part of the game.
The graphics in Battlecruiser Millennium are very dated and are more on par with games released in the late 90s. The ships themselves look "meh", but the weapon effects and explosions are dreadful. The textures used for the planets look pixelated at a distance, but close up become even worse which ruins the effect of watching your ship in close orbit.
The sounds in the game are abysmal. Sound effects are quite minimal and not very good at that. The voice acting for the voiceover's informing the player of various game events is just bad, and the voiceovers have an annoying tendency to overlap - needless to say this can be quite distracting when the action heats up. The voiceovers in the first-person mode are particularly abhorrent, and the screams of pain of your fellow soldiers sound almost comical. The background music sounds a lot like those European techno-trance tracks that you can download for free from places like mp3.com. They are somewhat interesting at first, but their repetitive nature quickly grows to be annoying. Turning the music off remedies this problem, but then you'll really be able to hear the poor quality of the sound effects.
The game's biggest draw is definitely commanding a starship in free roam mode. Hardcore sim fans will enjoy the level of detail in the ships and their systems. Players have access to a wealth of information, once they learn where to find it all. They also have a good degree of control over the various ship systems. Directing power to different systems, directing crew members, managing cargo, and selecting weapons configurations are just a few of the things over which players have control. Ultimately, it's these detail oriented gamers that will enjoy Battlecruiser Millennium the most. Those who are explorers at heart might be a bit disappointed, though. It can take a long time to get from place to place, and for all the space the game gives players to explore, there's just not that much motivation to explore it. The game's universe lacks a compelling mythos or story, and in the end serves as just a place to look for your next battle.
As it stands, the best things about Battlecruiser Millennium are merely Derek Smart's brilliant ambitions. Battlecruiser Millennium serves as a note that a limited scope allows for better design for a 2001 release. I'm sure that today's technology would've given a potential winner the release it needs.
Platform(s): PC Exclusive
ESRB Rating: Teen (Violence)
System Requirements: 300 MHz Pentium II CPU; 64 MB RAM; 16 MB Video RAM; 8x CD-ROM; 500 MB Hard Drive Space; Mouse.