The first Privateer was good, believe it or not dogfighting feels better than in Wing Commander.
So are the first three Wing Commander games worth playing? I have them on GOG but I didn't get past the lounge on WC1 before I booted up another game.
To me they are, note that I and III are much more repetitive than Tie Fighter or Freespace (II a bit less so).
Keep in mind that III has a full 3D engine so a lot of the more irritating stuff from the sprite-based engine of the first two games is gone.
I and II and expansions might require a save editor because sometimes the game glitches out and decides pilots that are still alive are dead which can rob you of some dialogues in the lounge.
Also the expansions are often stupidly difficult compared to the respective main games, I never got the good ending to the espansion of Wing Commander II.
For an extended rant about the engine quirks of the first two, another copy-pasted gog.com review (yikes, GOG really needs an editing function for the reviews, there are more typos, bad punctuation, half-formed sentences and missing words that I remember):
I played "SpaceSim" since I was eleven and had a 386DX, but I never ad the chance of playing Wing Commander till a week or so ago when I bought this package on GOG.com. The graphics for the time it came out were outstanding (much better than the monochromatic 3D models used in other similar games at the time) but unfortunately have a very bad influence on gameplay. The sprites used to render the ships work well enough for fighters and smaller crafts but are really impractical when it comes to asteroids and capital ships: The asteroids because they tend to pop up at a very short distance even while you can see supposedly smaller fighters much farther thus making dodging them a mattermore of luck than ability simetimes; For the capital ships the problem is that you don't get a real sense of the distance you are from them when you are flying against them, making mission where you have to defend or (in Wing Commander II) bombard them often you find yourself dead because you flew too close to them without noticing! A peculiarity of Wing Commander I & II compared to the more-or-less contemporary X-wing is the more arcade approach to combat: You don't get to manage your systems energy to compensate your fighter's faults so if you find yourself on a strike mission with a light fighter (it happens a couple of times) you cannot for instance trasfer your engine power to the shield when hammered down by an entire squadron of enemy interceptors. While the gameplay remains essentially the same in both games although the second game shows a series of improvements in pacing (main guns are a bit more powerful so you can destroy less powerful enemy fighters more rapidly) and balance, in particular capital ships in the first game were ludicrously easy to kill once you eliminated their fighter escort, while in the second game you had to use torpedoes (which need a lock and take a veeery long time to get it) which can be carried only by certain fighters and need to be launched really close to the capital ship without evasive manouver lest you lose the lock. There are also some problems with keyboard and mouse controls in with the savegame menu in the second game which made me lose savegames several frustrating times, essentially when you clicked on save/load game with a mouse ort by pressing enter the game instead of just loading the save/load menu loaded a game randomly, fortunately while using the Joystick to access the save/load menu I didn't have any particular issue. Another problem are the game crashes that happen in the second game sometimes during missions. The good is essentially in how the story is told, your wingmen have a personality (even though in the first game they are often too much stereotyped, even for an old school game) and you can have a chat with them between missions and in the non-linear campaign (there are two endings depending on how well you played) of the first game they can even die in combat and have a funeral cutscene with personalized dialogue from the CAG and the protagonist. The second game instead has a more cinematic approach with longer and more elaborate in-game cutscenes and although the campaign is a bit more linear the story is much better told and overall enjoyable even though it is not much more elaborate than the first. My advice is: if you aren't scared from the graphics (and the bugs of the second game) and you like spacesims this game is worth a try, prepare to die a lot (often in really frustrating ways, sometimes the only way to remain sane is using cheats) and at the same time enjoy one of the first experiments of implementing cinematic storytelling in an action game. The only thing that keeps me from giving four or five stars are the gameplay issues, otherwise I would have rated it a must buy.
I did also review III but at the time I was more generous with the game than I would be now (mostly because of the story, certain elements didn't quite strike me as bad at the time), but it's still an improvement.
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BlackWolf also releases the early subspace-faring transport, the GTT Monarch!
BlackWolf releases a trusty warehouse station, GTI Velas!
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