Keep failing your objectives, and you could end up with difficult odds and inferior ships, win and you’d find you’d have an easier time of it. Fail, and you’ll end up in a different system, with a different set of missions than if you won the previous battle.
Your success contributed to winning or losing the battle for the current star system, and would then affect which system you jumped into next. If you died, it was game over, and your story stopped there. The interaction with your colleagues in between missions, and the cinematic briefings and launch sequences only added to the fantasy element, and your progress on each mission affected the flow of the game.Įach star system you jumped into had a selection of missions, which you could win or lose, and by lose I mean fail an objective. The aforementioned branching story was another key element. It was amazing at the time, and facilitated those Star Wars/ Battlestar Galactica fantasies gamers had wanted to play out. This allowed the game to avoid simplistic wire-frame, vector graphics, and have far better-looking ships, whilst retaining a 3D aesthetic. Various angles were rendered for each fighter and object, and the game simply selected the appropriate angle to show at any one time to give the impression of 3D.
This engine, which may look archaic by today’s standards, tricked users into believing they were seeing a fully 3D universe by using rotating bitmapped sprites. It had it all for the time, lip syncing in cut-scenes, impressive AI, branching, open-ended story and a game engine called Origin FX that never failed to impress. This ability to give orders to your allies, not to mention the ability to taunt your foes, was just one of the novel features the game employed, and Wing Commander really did set the standard for the genre, and for things to come.Īlthough many of the features of the title had been seen in some fashion before, rarely had a game managed to combine so many technical features into one release. Missions involved seek and destroy, patrols, and escorts and, as to be expected from the name of the series, you did so with a wingman at your side, who you could order around during the mission. Not only was the game presented in a truly cinematic manner, a rarity for flight sims, but it featured gripping, accessible play and an absorbing story.Īs a newly graduated fighter pilot assigned to the Confederation carrier, The Tiger’s Claw, you were tasked with flying missions in various star systems against he Kilrathi threat.
#WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER REVIEW SERIES#
Although Star Wars: X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter usually manages to take the lion’s share of nominations for best classic space combat flight sim, Wing Commander was treading new territory in the genre long before the Lucasarts title, and right from the get go the series featured groundbreaking technology and gameplay mechanics. Spanning several instalments and spin-offs, the Wing Commander series is considered by many veteran gamers to be one of the best of all time. With a decent flight stick to hand and a system specification that could handle them, PCs back in the day wowed anyone lucky enough to get a chance to play some of the classic flighty titles, and one of the very best was Origin’s Wing Commander.
#WING COMMANDER PRIVATEER REVIEW PC#
The humble flight sim is one of the oldest genres around and one of the major reasons why PC gaming managed to, if you’ll forgive the pun, take off.
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