Lives on well in memory
I wrote the following review nearly 10 years ago, shocking grammar follows. This is your only warning!
At long last it has been released the much awaited Wing Commander 5. The wing commander series has always been a rival to the X-Wing series and still manages to hold it’s own 8 years on from the original games. The Wing Commander series started on the PC but also appeared on the consoles I actually own a copy of the original Wing Commander for the SNES and I also own a “Secret missions” version of it. At the time the graphics were great, flying through an asteroid belt landing at the Victory star ship and the animated cut-scenes but the game still had a major problem, it was sprite based. All this changed come Wing Commander 3 with its video cut-scenes and possibly the biggest computer game budget until Wing Commander 4. Even though the Wing Commander series has been going so long it was never quite as popular as Tie-Fighter and now with the release of Wing Commander 5 (Prophecy) perhaps X-Wing Vs Tie-Fighter can be beaten.
Unlike Lucas art’s X-Wing Vs Tie-Fighter this game lacks any multi-player options which some would say is a good thing allowing more of an in depth story for the 1 player mode and not allowing the game to turn into X-Wing Vs Tie-Fighter with all the main focus on 2-8 player melees. The problem with this is that the game may have a great idea behind it with a non-linear plot with different missions occurring depending on how wall your doing in the fight, but the whole experience does not last long enough. The game is on 3 CD’s so I would of expected a long game but my the time I was hoping for a middle, I was at the end and it would seem that the 3CD’s are mainly full of cut-scenes. Because of a lack of a multi-player mode, the fact that I completed it and the 120 odd Megs of space it uses, after 3 days it was uninstalled. Don’t get me wrong there are good points to the game but they mainly revolve around the graphics as this game has some of the greatest graphics ever seen in a computer game even without a 3DFX. If you are lucky enough to have a 3DFX accelerator then the graphical treats are many including smart lens flair (although that seems to standard for all 3d games nowadays) and the missile trails and colours look fantastic not to mention the much faster game frame rate. Frame rate is a good point because this game is REALLY processor hungry because with my Matrox mystique it jerks noticeably on my Cyrix 200 but with the same machine with a 3DFX card it runs like Linford Christy from Joe brand
Final Judgement
Strangely Wing commander 4 seemed to have more appeal than this besides it’s dated graphics it had a better lastability and once again a Wing Commander game falls short of beating a Star wars game You will need
P166 No 3DFX
P133 With 3DFX
32Mb Ram
Win ’95
150Mb hard disk space
Supports
3DFX, D3D, Power VR
Details
Web adress:
WWW.ORIGIN.COM
Phone:
01753-549442
Price:
£29.99