There, I finally finished WCS. Making notes in a notepad file as I progressed. This campaign feels about as long as the time the saga team spend working on it!
I'm going to go from the
Bad to the
Good since I want to end the review on a positive note. Remember, if I'm hurting you, its only because I love you.
This review might contain spoilers, read at your own risk.
The BadFirst off I'm going to be *that guy* and start about the code fork and other technical things.
Because of the code fork WCS feels like its two years behind the curve, there's a whole slew of new FSO features that are simply not present for the Terran-Kilrathi war. Post processing, FXAA, Soft Particles, Thruster and shockwave distortion, godrays, no fixed font and no widescreen hud support. For me though, the most notable is the apparant lack of self praising pilots. I still fondly recall hearing Maniac going "More kittylitter, I'm hot today!" and such. Yet despite the incredible amount of spoken lines for each pilot this is missing from WCS, even though FSO has support for it. One more thing that was sorely lacking was a command line in the launcher, no easy way to adjust the fov and no support for full screen windowed mode (this last one annoyed me in particular.)
An other thing that was changed in the WCS code was the video code. Now this new code seems to be working A-okay 99% of the time. Alas that other 1% of the time the whole video hung up on me, the video freezed while the sound kept playing for a little while longer. Then after a bit the whole game became unresponsive and crashed back to desktop. This happened to me twice during the briefings (not a big deal there) but... it also happened to me in the very last ending cutscene! After a 45 minute long mission, the cutscene froze up and the game crashed. It's not registered in the techroom so I can't bloody watch the thing! I'm denied my victory trophy like a kilrathi darket gets cheated out of his victory.
Now noooormally this wouldn't be such a big deal right? Just hit that magical Ctrl+Shift+S combo to reveal the whole list of cutscenes and missi-
oh
yeah
NOPE.Because for reasons beyond me, the WCS team decided it was a good idea to spend coder time to DISABLE THIS KEYCOMBINATION. No cheats, no shiplab and no Ctrl+Shift+S.
Now I initially wrote down a note about the mouse control being RUINED FOREVERRRR but that has become invalidated with the last patch! Regardless I played through the whole campaign with just the keyboard (It's nice to have options, PC rules, consoles drool) and that worked fine for me.
On an other small side note here, I experienced two occasions (once in an arrow and once in a thunderbolt) where my shields decided that today they could have a few moments off. Resulting in a very quick death on a jousting run. Thankfully this count has remained on just two times.
Now moving on to the gameplay/story part of the bad.
The mission design: Mission should not be consistently longer than 15 minutes. Period.
Alas, they are. In fact, near the end of the campaign the average mission length became closer to 25 minutes with one mission hitting 31 minutes for me and the very last mission lasted a full
45 minutes! Now this wouldn't be toooo bad if there was a checkpoint system in place, or a way to skip through the chatter. But as everyone has already discovered, there is no such thing. If you die at the last nav point (and lets face it, you are most likely to **** up somewhere along the last nav point) you'll be punished by needing to redo the whoooole mission again and some times listen to a full 2 to 4 minute amount of banter with nothing for you to do. (No cheats to lighten some of this load either... or hell, time compression...)
The content of the missions itself was on average pretty okay but it could definitely have done with less patrol missions. There was this one escort mission that I would rate as terribad. It followed this pattern: nav one: anti cap missiles. nav two: fighters. nav three: anti cap missiles. nav four: fighters and so forth. With no interesting chatter between the pilots to make it remotely interesting. I made it through the mission with 1% hull remaining... Which was about as much as the amount of interest I had left in the mission too. Thankfully this was one of the few rotten apples in the basket.
Campaign design wise I don't understand why there was no branching. With a full 50 missions in the campaign it seems wierd that you'd force the player to go through each and every last mission. Alas this seemed to be kind of a theme in the campaign. No player choice. Whatsoever. And this felt really un-wingcommanderish to me. You don't get to:
-Pick your own craft
-Choose your missile loadout until like 20 missions in (at some point you get promoted to 1st Lt)
-Choose anything in the mission itself
Instead you get this FreeSpace 2 approach of being transfered again and again inbetween squadrons and being stuck to one type of ship for the duration that you are with them.
Also, for a game called Wing Commander, you dont actually get to be a commander of any wing... What is up with this? In two of the earlier missions you can order your wingmen around because one of the dudes wanted to see if you were 'up to it'. Well, apparantly not! Because you don't make it higher than Captain in the campaign and you never get to give your wingmen orders in any of the missions in which it could make a difference...
Let's see... who can I blame for this?
Hmmm
Ah yes, got it.
Sandman.
Sandman is bluntly put, a terrible player character. I feel like he is the victim of 10 years of development. Like in each stage of the development the WCS team couldn't decide what to do with Sandman's personality. Sandman flip flops between a clueless rookie, a smart ass, a jerk, a mute person and just your average guy trying to do his duty.
Who would want to give a guy with such mental issues a wing to command?!
However none of this annoyed me as much as the complete and utter disconnect between gameplay and narrative that flows through the whole of the WCS story. I can't even reproduce the rage that I spewed on irc ranting about this. So I'll just copy paste a bunch of irc vileness:
[02:46] <Spoon> you are some newbie pilot coming to this carrier as battle loss replacement
[02:46] <Spoon> if you ignore the 5 prologue missions (In which you fought hard and long and eventually lost your old carrier) you are new and treated as such
[02:46] <Spoon> every pilot keeps mentioning how sandman (the player character, a clueless newb) is the newbie
[02:46] <Spoon> and how he sucks
[02:46] <Spoon> and doesnt count
[02:46] <Spoon> 20 missions later
[02:47] <Spoon> 200 ****ING KILLS LATER
[02:47] <Spoon> EVERYONE STILL CALLS YOU A ****ING NEWBIE
[02:47] <@Axem> and how many bronze and silver stars?
[02:47] <@Axem> and ace commendations
[02:47] <redsniper> well you see, you have to uh... differentiate the gameplay from the story or... whatever bull**** it is people say
[02:48] <Spoon> 350 KILLS LATER, INCLUDING SEVERAL CAPITAL SHIPS, 3 BRONZE STARS, 2 SILVER STARS, 1 ACE RIBBON, 1 ACE OF ACES RIBBON AND A BUNCH MORE. THESE ****ERS, STILL TALK ABOUT **** LIKE "OH LOOK GUYS, ITS 3 VS 12. I LIKE THESE ODDS." "ARENT YOU FORGETTING SOMEONE LOL?" "OH SANDMAN? HE DOESNT COUNT BECAUSE HES A NEWBIE LOL"
[02:48] <redsniper> since naturally we can't even ATTEMPT to make the gameplay logically fit in with the story, or something
[02:48] <Spoon> **** YOUR ****
[02:48] <Spoon> I MADThe kill count rapidly starts inflating when you get to fly the Excalibur too. I often found me with around 50-80 dead cats on my name in the last missions. At one point I was actively wondering why nobody was on their knees sucking my ACE COCK. Oh right, I forgot. I'm 'just a newbie'. Damn you Sandman for being such a ****ty character. Before the last mission I was at 961 kills. This included several carriers, destroyers, cruisers and a drydock. I singlehandely took down several kilrathi carrier groups worth of cats and war material. Can I at least get some proper respect?!
Unforunately, the whole of WCS is written under the motto of this one quote "The reward of doing your duty is not getting punishment" (I probably didn't quoted it exactly word for word, but you get the point) In the end this kinda resulted in me just not caring about completing certain objectives. I don't really feel compelled to give my best just so I can have Bronze Star (5) instead of (4) in my medal case and then get called a newbie in the mission after. Even in one of the last three missions they told me that I was 'still in diapers'. Wow guys. I nearly flipped my desked at this point. Semi related to this subject was the last fight with that Kilrathi Ace. It didn't really felt like 'my fight'. Why should I care? This is some feud between Venom and him. I have no beef with this guy.
WCS unforunately does not use the more advanced A.I. seen in Vassago's Dirge, Blue planet and Wings of Dawn. Resulting in sluggish and easy to destroy Kilrathi. Making them seem more like snails than fierce cats at times. And in some missions they do not seem to have a basic grasp of tactics. Sending mindless waves after waves of fighters to destroy (what I assume to be) unmanned fighters transfering between two carriers seems like a terrible idea to me. Trading over 60 fighters (and in the end a whole carrier) for the destruction of a few unmanned fighters? Really? Why are the Kilrathi so mindless in WCS? I keep needing to be reminded that we are 'losing this war' in briefings. Because when every mission I fly involves dealing devastating blows to the Kilrathi, its easy to miss that.
One more point I feel WCS is unforunately kinda lackluster in is weapon impact effects. Powerful guns like the Plasma has this tiny itty bity impact that is hardly visible. And I think it was the neutron gun has an impact effect of a different color than the bolt itself. There are also no muzzle flashes coming from the turrets or the guns on the fighters. Pity.
The questionableThere is only one piece of fiction viewer. This struck me as a bit strange, I for one wouldn't have minded a bit more of :words: inbetween the missions. Flesh the characters out a bit more (ya know, give Sandman an actual personality), give the player a bit of a moment to settle down inbetween the furious missions too. On the other hand, I understand that writing these things take an ass load of development time so I can't really fault the WCS team for it. (I think headdie already pointed this out in one thread, but Greywolf seems like a tremendous douchebag in the one bit of fiction writer, but he's actually one of the more cool characters in the missions themselves imho).
Now this next point is debatable but while WCS captures the Wing Commander atmosphere perfectly and sets a pretty good military tone to the missions, I feel that there could have been space for a bit more 'inventive gameplay'. Check Vassago's Dirge and Blue planet out for example, they do more with their missions than just 'follow nav points, blow up stuff'. Alas, this is kinda what Wing Commander tends to be about most of the time so.
Also, the briefing cutscenes could have done with a few more camera movement and/or angles.
Cut off at least 5 seconds from the autopilot sequence. The camera follows the ships into the distance for just that tad too long... Shaving off that 5 seconds quickly becomes a time saver (assuming an average of 5 auto pilot sequences for 50 missions = 1250 seconds, that's 20 minutes you could have saved the player fiddling his thumbs)
The confederation consists of nothing but white people apparantly. The only
token black guy gets
killed off immediately in the only mission he appears in.
Strakha aren't actually unshielded while cloaked.
The Good Still with me after that rant? Great!
First off, WCS captures the Wing Commander feel perfectly. The sounds, the feel of the craft, the atmosphere of it all, the weapons, the missiles, the autopilot system. It's all there and it feels great. The assets are all great looking, the confederation fighters in particular look like how you'd expect them too look in 2012. It was just plain fun to fly around these iconic (for me at least, I have strong nostalgia goggles for wing commander) ships and fighters. Blowing up those great looking kilrathi caps and fighters is just good fun.
Props to the music too! It helped set the atmosphere and was plenty of blood pumping.
The whole experience just feels really polished, it has a few nice cutscenes and every briefing cutscene is pretty well done. The mainhall is a nice touch too. You can certainly feel the 10 years of development in these parts.
However the biggest props has absolutely without doubt got to go to the voice acting. The sheer amount of different voices and the amount of spoken dialogue is staggering. And each voice actor gives a good performance. Out of the huge amount of voices I only disliked the voice of Mastermind. (He talks like captain kirk or something, putting accents on random words, not ending his sentences normally. After a bit it started giving a headache. Also why can't Captain Moran pronounce Loki as Loki, instead of 'lo-kai'?). And I tend to be pretty damn critical of voice acting so that's a major acomplishment in my book. And while I'm on the subject, an other big props to the large amount of female voices that contributed. These kinda 'nerdy games' often become a bit of a sausagefest but WCS has skillfully avoided this.
On a few occasions the dialogue is really witty and funny too. I was laughing out loud when a captain named pothead decided to be stupid and died trying to take on a destroyer alone. The resulting spite his death got from his wingmen was just my type of dark humor. And the banter that involved Ninja and Assassin tickled my funny bone on numerous occasions.
The few voices done for Kilrathi aces sounded pretty kilrathi-ish too.
With the exception of Sandman and Mastermind, I ended up liking the vast majority of characters that WCS presented. They all had some touch of personality, eccentric behavior or crazyiness to them. I though the way the guys interacted with the Victory crew was kinda cute too. Though at a few moments it was a little too obvious that the whole dialogue was written to accomendate what lines could be used from WC3 and it didn't flowed too well because of it. Still, it was a nice little touch. (Props for using Primate for this btw)
What I unforunately didn't liked was how scripted and unavoidable the deaths of a few characters were. (Like this pilot named Dawn suddenly going "HURR DURR DONT WORRY I GOT THIS BLARGH I DED" even though she didn't even reached weapon range yet...) while the rest had plotarmor.
The character that was not part of the Hermes and stood out the most for me was M.D., he was just all sorts of crazy. And because of it, highly amusing.
There are two missions that really stick in my mind as THE absolute highlights of WCS and imho should have been the final missions of the campaign. The first one being the attack on the Drydock. Punching through the defensive line with full afterburner to put the torps into the Drydock's hangerbay was a rush. Tons of lasers going past my Longbow, while Kilrathi fighters closely pass by with guns blazing. Then skimming along the Drydock's shielded surface and seeing all these lasers, that are aimed for me, impacting with it. I was about to declare that mission to be my favorite but then only shortly after there is one more highlight.
The mission that has the Hermes' battlegroup doing an all out assault on a Kilrathi heavy carrier and her group. Especially the first moments of the mission remind me of
this star wars scene. It just an insanely awesome furball followed by capital ship bombing. I would have been content had the campaign just ended right after this mission, cause imo nothing topped that came after it topped it.
And a honorable mention to the mission with the Valkyries.
Overal I give WCS a 8 out of 10 and a seal of Spoon approval.
While the list of negatives is longer than the list of positive things in this review, its because this game made me care (which is an acomplishment in itself, since I'm a jaded and cynical person). I spend a whole bunch of hours playing WCS these past few days and I often found myself thinking about it in bed, trying to get to sleep. WCS is definitely the closest we're gonna get to a 'commercial' done Wing Commander. Well done and thanks for delivering this Wing Commander experience.
*edit: forgot to add soft particles!*
